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MILTON'S SONNETS 



WITH INTRODUCTION, NOTES, GLOSSARY 
AND INDEXES 



BY 

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SOMETIME SCHOLAR OF TRINITY COLLEGE; 
EDITOR OF 'THE PITT PRESS SHAKESPEARE FOR SCHOOLS.' 






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First Edition, 1895. 

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Replacement 



NOTE. 

THE sketch of Milton's life is inserted in this 
volume as it illustrates some points that occur 
in the Sonnets. 

A. W. V. 

April, 1895. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGES 

Introduction ix — xxxii 

Life of Milton ix — xxiii 

Introduction to the Sonnets . . . xxiv — xxviii 
A selection of Criticisms on the Sonnets xxix — xxxii 

Sonnets i — 27 

Notes 29—63 

Glossary 64—66 

Appendix 67 — 76 

Indexes 77 — 78 



V 



INTRODUCTION. 



4 LIFE OF MILTON. 

Milton's life falls into three clearly defined divisions. The 
first period ends with the poet's return from Italy Thethree 
in 1639; the second at the Restoration in 1660, periods in Mil- 
when release from the fetters of politics enabled 
him to remind the world that he was a great poet, if not a great 
controversialist ; the third is brought to a close with his death 
in 1674. Paradise Lost belongs to the last of these periods ; 
but we propose to summarise briefly the main events of all 
three. 

John Milton was born on December 9, 1608, in London. He 
came, in his own words, ex genere honesto. A Bom 1608; the 
family of MUtons had been settled in Oxfordshire P ***/**^ 
since the reign of Elizabeth. The poet's father had been 
educated at an Oxford school, possibly as a chorister in one of 
the College choir-schools, and imbibing Anglican sympathies 
had conformed to the Established Church. For this he was 
disinherited by his father. He settled in London, following the 
profession of scrivener. A scrivener combined the occupations 
of lawyer and law-stationer. It appears to have been a lucrative 
calling; certainly John Milton (the poet was named after the 
father) attained to easy circumstances. He married about 
1600, and had six children, of whom several died young. The 
third child was the poet. 

The elder Milton was evidently a man of considerable 
culture, in particular an accomplished musician, and a com- 



X INTRODUCTION. 

poser 1 whose madrigals were deemed worthy of being printed 
side by side with those of Byrd, Orlando Gibbons and other 
leading musicians of the time. To him, no doubt, the poet 
owed the love of music of which we see frequent indications in 
the poems 2 . Realising, too, that in his son lay the promise 
and possibility of future greatness, John Milton took the utmost 
pains to have the boy adequately educated ; and the lines Ad 
Patrem show that the ties of affection between father and child 
were of more than ordinary closeness. 

Milton was sent to St Paul's School as a day scholar about 
Early train- the year 1620. He also had a tutor, Thomas 
mg ' Young, a Scotchman, who subsequently became 

Master of Jesus College, Cambridge. More important still, 
Milton grew up in the stimulating atmosphere of cultured 
home-life. This was a signal advantage. There are few who 
realise that the word 'culture* signifies anything very definite 
or desirable before they pass to the University; for Milton, 
however, home-life meant, from the first, not only broad interests 
and refinement, but active encouragement towards literature 
and study. In 1625 he left St Paul's. Of his extant English 
poems 3 only one, On the Death of a Fair Infant^ dates from his 
school-days ; but we are told that he had written much verse, 
English and Latin. And his early training had done that 
which was all-important : it had laid the foundation of the far- 
ranging knowledge which makes Paradise Lost unique for 
diversity of suggestion and interest. 

Milton entered at Christ's College, Cambridge, commencing 
residence in the Easter term of 1625. Seven years 

At Cambridge. __ . . __ » * • i-» a 

were spent at the University. He took his B.A. 
degree in 1029, proceeded M.A. in 1632, and in the latter year 

1 See the article on him in Grove's Dictionary of Music. 

2 Milton was very fond of the organ; see II Penseroso, 161, note. 
During his residence at Horton Milton made occasional journeys to 

, London to hear, and obtain instruction in, music. 

3 His paraphrases of Psalms cxiv, cxxxvi, scarcely come under this 
heading. Aubrey says in his quaint Life of Milton : "Anno Domini 
1619 he was ten yeares old, as by his picture : and was then a poet." 



LIFE OF MILTON. XI 

left Cambridge. His experience of University life had not 
been wholly fortunate. He was, and felt himself to be, out of 
sympathy with his surroundings ; and whenever in after-years 
he spoke of Cambridge 1 it was with something of the grave 
impietas of Gibbon who, unsoftened even by memories of 
Magdalen, complained that the fourteen months spent at 
Oxford were the least profitable part of his life. Milton, in 
fact, anticipates the laments that we find in the correspond- 
ence of Gray, addressed sometimes to Richard West and 
reverberated from the banks of the I sis. It may, however, be 
fairly assumed that, whether consciously or not, Milton owed 
a good deal to his University ; and it must not be for- 
gotten that the uncomplimentary and oft-quoted allusions to 
Cambridge date for the most part from the unhappy period 
when Milton the politician and polemical dogmatist had 
effectually divorced himself at once from Milton the scholar 
and Milton the poet. A poet he had proved himself before 
leaving the University. The short but exquisite ode At a 
Solemn Music, and the Nativity Hymn (1629), were already 
written. 



1 That Milton's feeling towards the authorities of his own college 
was not entirely unfriendly would appear from the following sentences 
written in 1642. t He takes, he says, the opportunity to " acknowledge 
publicly, with all grateful mind, that more than ordinary respect which 
I found, above many of my equals, at the hands of those courteous and 
learned men, the Fellows of that college wherein I spent some years ; 
who, at my parting after I had taken two degrees, as the manner is, 
signified many ways how much better it would content them that I 
would stay ; as by many letters full of kindness and loving respect, 
both before that time and long after, I was assured of their singular 
good affection towards me." — Apology for Smeclymnuus, P. W. in. in. 
Perhaps Cambridge would have been more congenial to Milton had he 
been sent to Emmanuel College, long a stronghold of Puritanism. 
Dr John Preston, then Master of the college, was a noted leader of the 
Puritan party. (Throughout this Introduction Milton's prose- works, in 
Bohn's edition, are referred to under the abbreviation P. W.) 



Xll INTRODUCTION. 

Milton's father had settled 1 at Horton in Buckinghamshire. 
The five years Thither the son retired in July, 1632. He had 
IpenfatHor- g° ne to Cambridge with the intention of qualifying 
ton - for some profession, perhaps the Church 2 . This 

purpose was soon given up, and when Milton returned to his 
father's house he seems to have made up his mind that there 
was no profession which he cared to enter. He would choose 
the better part of studying and preparing himself, by rigorous 
self-discipline and application, for the far-off divine event to 
which his whole life moved. 

It was Milton's constant resolve to achieve something that 
The key to should vindicate the ways of God to men, some- 
MiitorisUfe. thing great 3 that should justify his own possession 
of unique powers — powers of which, with no trace of egotism, 
he proclaims himself proudly conscious. The feeling finds 
repeated expression in his prose » it is the guiding-star that 
shines clear and steadfast even through the mists of politics. 
He has a mission to fulfil, a purpose to accomplish, no less 

1 As tenant of the Earl of Bridge water, according to one account ; 
but probably the tradition arose from Milton's subsequent connection 
with the Bridgewater family. 

2 Cf. Milton's own words, "The Church, to whose service by the 
intention of my parents and friends I was destined of a child, and 
in my own resolutions." What kept him from taking orders was 
not, at first, any difference of belief, but solely his objection to Church 
discipline and government. "Coming to some maturity of years, and 
perceiving what tyranny had invaded the church, that he who would 

take orders must subscribe slave (I) thought it better to prefer a 

blameless silence before the sacred office of speaking, bought and begun 
with servitude and forswearing." — Reason of Church Government * 
P. IV. 11. 482. Milton disliked in particular the episcopal system, 
and spoke of himself as " Church-outed by the prelates." 

3 Cf. the second sonnet; " How soon hath Time." Ten years later 
(1641) Milton speaks of the " inward prompting which grew daily upon 
me, that by labour and intent study, which I take to be my portion in 
this life, joined with the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps 
leave something so written to after times, as they should not willingly 
let it die." — Reason of Church Government , P, W. II. 477, 478. 



LIFE OF MILTON. xili 

than the most fanatic of religious enthusiasts ; and the means 
whereby this end is to be attained are fourfold : devotion to 
learning, devotion to religion, ascetic purity of life, and the 
pursuit of o-Trovdaiorrjs or "excellent seriousness" of thought. 

This period of self-centred isolation lasted from 1632 to 1638. 
Gibbon tells us among the many wise things contained in that 
most wise book the Autobiography, that every man has two 
educations : that which he receives from his teachers and that 
which he owes to himself; the latter being infinitely the more 
important. During these five years Milton completed his 
second education ; ranging the whole world of classical 1 anti- 
quity and absorbing the classical genius so thoroughly that 
the ancients were to him what they afterwards became to 
Landor, what they have never become to any other English 
poet in the same degree, even as the very breath of his 
being ; learning, too, all of art, especially music, that contempo- 
rary England could furnish; wresting from modern literatures 
(especially Italian 2 ) their last secrets; and combining these vast 
and diverse influences into a splendid equipment of hard-won, 
well-ordered culture. The world has known many greater 
scholars in the technical, limited sense than Milton, but few 
men, if any, who have mastered more things worth mastering 
in art, letters and scholarship 3 . It says much for the poet that 
he was sustained through this period of study, pursued ohne 
Hast, ohne Rast, by the full consciousness that all would be 
crowned by a masterpiece which should add one more testi- 
mony to the belief in that God who ordains the fates of men. 
It says also a very great deal for the father who suffered his 
son to follow in this manner the path of learning. 

1 He was closely familiar too with post-classical writers like Philo 
and the neo-Platonists ; nor must we forget the mediaeval element in 
his learning, due often to Rabbinical teaching. 

2 Cf. his Italian poems (pp. 5 — 10). 

3 Milton's poems with their undercurrent of perpetual allusion are 
the best proof of the width of his reading ; but interesting supplementary 
evidence is afforded by the commonplace book discovered in 1874, and 
printed by the Camden Society, 1876. It contains extracts from about 
80 different authors whose works Milton had studied. 



xiv INTRODUCTION. 

True, Milton gave more than one earnest of his future 
Milton's lyric fame. The dates of the early pieces — LAllegro^Il 
""tion to content- Pcuseroso, Arcades, Co7?ius and Lycidas — are not 
porary life. a }} certain ; but probably each was composed 
at Horton before 1638. We have spoken of them elsewhere. 
Here we may note that four of them have great autobiographic 
value as an indirect commentary, written from Miltou's coign 
of seclusion, upon the moral crisis through which English life 
and thought were passing, the clash between the careless 
hedonism of the Cavalier world and the deepening austerity 
of Puritanism. In LAllegro the poet holds the balance 
almost equal between the two opposing tendencies. In // 
Peiiseroso it becomes clear to which side his sympathies are 
leaning. Comus is a covert prophecy of the downfall of the 
Court- party, while Lycidas openly "foretells the mine" of the 
Established Church. The latter poem is the final utterance of 
Milton's lyric genius. Here he reaches, in Mr Mark Pattison's 
words, the high-water mark of English verse ; and then — the 
pity of it — he resigns that place among the lyrici vates of which 
the Roman singer was ambitious, and for nearly twenty years 
suffers his lyre to hang mute and rusty in the temple of the 
Muses. 

The composition of Lycidas may be assigned to the year 
Travels in 1637. In the spring of the next year Milton started 
{tefirsip7rifd f° r Italy. He had long made himself a master of 
in his life. Italian, and it was natural that he should seek 

inspiration in the land where many English poets, from 
Chaucer to Shelley, have found it. Milton remained abroad 
some fifteen months. Originally he had intended to include 
Sicily and Greece in his travels, but .news of the troubles in 
England hastened his return. He was brought face to face 
Ca e of his Wlt ^ t * ie question whether or not he should bear 
return to Eng- his part in the coming struggle; whether without 
self-reproach he could lead any longer this life of 
learning and indifference to the public weal. He decided as we 
might have expected that he would decide, though some good 
critics «ee cause to regret the decision. Milton puts his 



LIFE OF MILTON. XV 

position very clearly. " I considered it," he says, " dishonour- 
able to be enjoying myself at my ease in foreign lands, while 
my countrymen were striking a blow for freedom." And again : 
" Perceiving that the true way to liberty followed on from these 
beginnings, inasmuch also as I had so prepared myself from 
my youth that, ab&ve all things, I could not be ignorant what 
is of Divine and what of human right, I resolved, though I 
was then meditating certain other matters, to transfer into this 
struggle all my genius and all the strength of my industry." 

The summer of 1639 (July) found Milton back in England. 
Immediately after his return he wrote the Epita- Th se ^ 
phium Da?nonis, the beautiful elegy in which he period, 1640— 
lamented the death of his school friend, Diodati. abandons poe- 
Lycidas was the last of the English lyrics : the try ' 
Epitaphium, which should be studied in close connection with 
Lycidas, the last of the long Latin pdems. Thenceforth, for a 
long spell, the rest was silence, so far as concerned poetry. The 
period which for all men represents the strength and maturity 
of manhood, which in the cases of other poets produces the best 
and most characteristic work, is with Milton a blank. In twenty 
years he composed no more than a bare handful of Sonnets, 
and even some of these are infected by the taint of political 
animus. Other interests 1 filled his thoughts — the question of 
Church-reform, education, marriage, and, above all, politics. 

Milton's first treatise upon the government of the Established 
Church (Of Reformation touching Church-Disci- Pamphlets on 
pline in England) appeared in 1641. Others fndEduca- 
followed in quick succession. The abolition of tion - 
Episcopacy was the watch-word of the enemies of the Anglican 
Church — the delenda est Carthago cry of Puritanism, and no one 
enforced the point with greater eloquence than Milton. During 
1641 and 1642 he wrote five pamphlets on the subject. Mean- 
while he was studying the principles of education. On his 
return from Italy he had undertaken the training of his nephews. 

*. Milton seems to have cherished some hope of beginning a great 
poem as late as 1641 — 2 ; probably the latter year marked his final 
surrender of the scheme. 



XVI INTRODUCTION. 

This led to consideration of the best educational methods ; and 

in the Tractate of Education, 1644, Milton assumed the part of 

educational theorist. In the previous year, May, 

Marriage. , r ; ' ; ' 

1643, he married 1 . The marriage proved unfortu- 
nate. Its immediate outcome was the pamphlets on Divorce. 
Clearly he had little leisure for literature proper. 

The finest of Milton's prose works, the Areopagitica, a plea 
Political Pam- *° r ^ Q * ree expression of opinion, was published in 
phuts. Ap- 1644. In 1645 2 he edited the first collection of his 

pointment to . . 

Latin Secre- poems. In 1 049 his advocacy of the anti-royalist 
arysmp. cause was recognised by the offer of a post under 

the newly appointed Council of State. His bold vindication of 
the trial of Charles I., The Tenure of Kings, had appeared 

1 His wife (who was only seventeen) was Mary Powell, eldest 
daughter of Richard Powell, of Forest Hill, a village some little 
distance from Oxford. She went to stay with her father in July 
1643, and refused to return to Milton; why, it is not certain. She 
was reconciled to her husband in 1645, bore him four children, and 
died in 1652, in her twenty- seventh year. No doubt, the scene in P. L. 
X. 909 — 936, in which Eve begs forgiveness of Adam, reproduced the 
poet's personal experience, while many passages in Samson Agonistes 
must have been inspired by the same cause. 

2 i.e. old style. The volume was entered on the registers of the 
Stationers' Company under the date of October 6th, 1645. ^ was 
published on Jan. 2, 1645 — 6, with the following title page : 

" Poems of Mr. John Aft/ton, both English a?id Latin, compos' J at 
several times. Printed by his true Copies. The Songs were set in M it sick 
by Mr. Henry Lawes, gentleman of the King's Chappel, and one of His 
Majesties private Musick. 

* B ace are front em 

Cingite, ne vati noceat mala lingua futuro? ViRG. Eel. 7. 
Printed and published according to Order. London, Printed by Ruth 
Raworth, for Hiunphrey Moseley, and are to be sold at the signe of the 
Princes Arms in Pauls Churchyard. 1645." 

From the prefatory Address to the Reader it is clear that the collec- 
tion was due to the initiative of the publisher. Milton's own feeling is 
expressed by the motto, where the words " vati futuro " show that, as 



LIFE OF MILTON. xvii 

earlier in the same year. Milton accepted the offer, becoming 
Latin 1 Secretary to the Committee of Foreign Affairs. There 
was nothing distasteful about his duties. He drew up the 
despatches to foreign governments, translated state-papers, and 
served as interpreter to foreign envoys. Had his duties stopped 
here his acceptance of the post would, I think, have proved 
an unqualified gain. It brought him into contact with the first 
men in the state 2 , gave him a practical insight The advantage 
into the working of national affairs and the motives °f the P° st - 
of human action ; in a word, furnished him with that experience 
of life which is essential to all poets who aspire to be something 
more than " the idle singers of an empty day." But unfortu- 
nately the secretaryship entailed the necessity of Its disadvan- 
defending at every turn the past course of the ta s e - 
revolution and the present policy of the Council. Milton, in 
fact, held a perpetual brief as advocate for his party. Hence 
the endless and unedifying controversies into which he drifted ; 
controversies which wasted the most precious years of his life, 
warped, as some critics think, his nature, and eventually cost 
him his eyesight. 

Between 1649 an d 1660 Milton produced no less than eleven 
pamphlets. Several of these arose out of the pub- Milton s writ- 
lication of the famous Eikon Basilike. The book J3^ \™ e e Cof £ 
was printed in 1649 an< ^ created so extraordinary a men-wealth. 

he judged, his great achievement was yet to come. The volume was 
divided into two parts, the first containing the English, the second the 
Latin poems. Comus was printed at the close of the former, with a 
separate title-page to mark its importance. 

1 A Latin Secretary was required because the Council scorned, as 
Edward Phillips says, "to carry on their affairs in the wheedling, 
lisping jargon of the cringing French." Milton's salary was ^288, in 
modern money about ^"900. 

2 There is no proof that Milton ever had personal intercourse with 
Cromwell, and Mr Mark Pattison implies that he was altogether 
neglected by the foremost men of the time. Yet it seems unlikely 
that the Secretary of the Committee should not have been on friendly 
terms with some of its members, Vane, for example, and Whitelocke. 

M. S. b 



xviii INTRODUCTION. 

sensation that Milton was asked to reply to it. This he did 
with EikonoklasteS) introducing the wholly unworthy sneer at 
Sidney's Arcadia and the awkwardly expressed reference to 
Shakespeare 1 . Controversy of this barren type has the in- 
herent disadvantage that once started it may never end. The 
Royalists commissioned the Leyden professor, Salmasius, to 
prepare a counterblast, the Defensio Pegia, and this in turn 
was met by Milton's Pro Populo A7iglica7io Defensio^ 1651, 
over the preparation of which he lost what little 

His blindness. •* . ,© « , • ■^ 

power of eyesight remained 2 . Salmasius retorted, 
and died before his second farrago of scurrilities was issued : 
Milton was bound to answer, and the Defensio Secunda 
appeared in 1654. Neither of the combatants gained any- 
thing by the dispute ; while the subsequent development of the 

1 See UAllegrO) 133 — 134, note. It would have been more to the 
point to remind his readers that the imprisoned king must have spent a 
good many hours over La Calprenede's Cassandre. 

2 Perhaps this was the saddest part of the episode. Milton tells us 
in the Defensio Secunda that his eyesight was injured by excessive study 
in boyhood : "from the twelfth year of my age I scarce ever left my 
lessons and went to bed before midnight. This was the first cause of 
my blindness." Continual reading and writing must have increased 
the infirmity, and by 1650 the sight of the left eye had gone. He was 
warned that he must not use the other for book- work. Unfortunately 
this was just the time when the Commonwealth stood most in need of 
his services. If Milton had not written the first Defence he might have 
retained his partial vision. The choice lay between private good and 
public duty. He repeated in 1650 the sacrifice of 1639. "In such a 
case I could not listen to the physician, not if yEsculapius himself had 
spoken from his sanctuary ; I could not but obey that inward monitor, 

I know not what, that spoke to me from heaven I concluded to 

employ the little remaining eyesight I was to enjoy in doing this, 
the greatest service to the common weal it was in my power to render " 
(Second Defe7ice). By the Spring of 1652 Milton was quite blind. He 
was then in his forty- fourth year. Probably the disease from which he 
suffered was amaurosis. See the Appendix (pp. 120, 121) on P. L. ill. 
22 — 26. Throughout P. L. and Samson Agonistes there are frequent 
references to his affliction. 



LIFE OF MILTON. XIX 

controversy in which Milton crushed the Amsterdam pastor 
and professor, Morus, goes far to prove the contention of 
Mr Mark Pattison, that it was an evil day when the poet left 
his study at Horton to do battle for the Commonwealth amid 
the vulgar brawls of the market-place : 
"Not here, O Apollo, 
Were haunts meet for thee." 
Fortunately this poetic interregnum in Milton's life was 
not destined to last much longer. The Restoration 

& m m The Restora- 

came, a blessing in disguise, and in 1660 1 the ruin Hon releases 

_,_.. , ., , 1a iri . . Milton from 

of Milton s political 2 party and of his personal politics. Re- 
hopes, the absolute overthrow of the cause for ^rn to poetry. 
which he had fought for twenty years, left him free. The 
author of Lycidas could once more become a poet. 

Much has been written upon this second period, 1639 — 1660, 
and a word may be said here. We saw what should Milton 
parting of the ways confronted Milton on his f^ L ' pt ff t f c r Ji 
return from Italy. Did he choose aright? Should &f*1 
he have continued upon the path of learned leisure? There 
are writers who argue that Milton made a mistake. 0ne re p t to 
A poet, they say, should keep clear of political this Q^stion. 
strife: fierce controversy can benefit no man: who touches 
pitch must expect to be, certainly will be, defiled : Milton 
sacrificed twenty of the best years of his life, doing work which 
an underling could have done and which was not worth doing: 
another Comics might have been written, a loftier Lycidas: that 
literature should be the poorer by the absence of these possible 
masterpieces, that the second greatest genius which England 
has produced should in a way be the "inheritor of unfulfilled 
renown," is and must be a thing entirely and terribly deplorable. 
This is the view of the purely literary critic. Mr Mark Pattison 
writes very much to this effect. 

1 The date 1660 must not be pressed too closely. As a matter of 
strict detail, Milton probably began Paradise Lost in 1658 ; but it was 
not till the Restoration in 1660 that he definitely resigned all his 
political hopes, and became quite free to realise his poetical ambition. 

2 The changes in his political views cannot be traced here. 

l>2 



XX INTRODUCTION. 

There remains the other side of the question. It may fairly 
The opposite ^ e contended that had Milton elected in ^639 to 
vie7V ' live the scholar's life apart from "the action of 

men," Paradise Lost, as we have it, could never have been 
written 1 . Knowledge of life and human nature, insight into the 
problems of men's motives and emotions, grasp of the broader 
issues of the human tragedy, all these were essential to the 
author of an epic poem ; they could only be obtained through 
commerce with the world ; they would have remained beyond 
the reach of a recluse. Dryden complained that Milton saw 
nature through the spectacles of books : we might have had to 
complain that he saw men through the same medium. For- 
tunately it is not so : and it is not so because at the age of 
thirty-two he threw in his fortunes with those of his country; 
like the diver in Schiller's ballad he took the plunge which was 
to cost him so dear. The mere man of letters will never move 
the world. ^Eschylus fought at Marathon: Shakespeare was 
practical to the tips of his fingers ; a better business man than 
Goethe there was not within a radius of a hundred miles of 
Weimar. 

This aspect of the question is emphasised by Milton himself.. 
Milton s own ^he man ? ne says, " who would not be frustrate of 
opinion. hi s hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, 

ought himself to be a true poem, that is, a composition and 
pattern of the best and honourablest things, not 2 presuming to 
sing high praises of heroic men or famous cities, unless he have 
within hi7iiself the experience and the practice of all that which 
is praiseworthy" Again, in estimating the qualifications which 
the writer of an epic such as he contemplated should possess, 
he is careful to include "insight into all seemly and generous 
arts and affairs 3 " 

Truth usually lies half-way between extremes : perhaps it 
Now politics does so here. No doubt, Milton did gain very 
™ a y ha ? e gj- greatly by breathing awhile the larger air of public 
poet. life, even though that air was often tainted by 

1 This is true of Samson Agonistes too. 2 The italics are mine. 

3 Reason of Church Government, P. W. II. 481. 



LIFE OF MILTON. XXI 

much impurity. No doubt, too, twenty years of contention 
must have left their mark even on Milton. In one of the 
very few places 1 where he "abides our question," Shakespeare 
writes : 

O ! for my sake do you with Fortune chide, 

The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds, 

That did not better for my life provide, 

Than public means, which public manners breeds : 

Thence comes it that my name receives a brand ; 

And almost thence my nature is subdu'd 

To what it works in, like the dyer's hand. 

Milton's genius was subdued in this way. If we compare 
him, the Milton of the great epics and of Samson Agonistes, 
with Homer or Shakespeare — and none but the greatest can 
be his parallel — we find in him a certain want of humanity, 
a touch of narrowness. He lacks the large-heartedness, the 
genial, generous breadth of Shakespeare; the sympathy and 
sense of the lacrimce rerum that even in Troilus and Cressida or 
Timon of Athens are there for those who have eyes wherewith 
to see them. Milton reflects many of the less gracious aspects 
of Puritanism, its intolerance, want of humour, one-sided in- 
tensity. He is stern and austere, and it seems natural to 
assume that this narrowness was to a great extent the price he 
paid for twenty years of ceaseless special pleading and dispute. 
The real misfortune of his life lay in the fact that he fell on evil, 
angry days when there was no place for moderate men. He 
had to be one of two things: either a controversialist or a 
student : there was no via media. Probably he chose aright ; 
but we could wish that the conditions under which he chose 
had been different. 

The last part of Milton's life, 1660 — 1674, passed quietly. 
At the age of fifty-two he was thrown back upon , 

poetry, and could at length discharge his self- iteration to 
imposed obligation. The early poems he had 
never regarded as a fulfilment of the debt due to his Creator. 

1 Somut CXI. 



XX11 INTRODUCTION. 

Even when the fire of political strife burned at its hottest, Milton 
did not forget the purpose which he had conceived in his boy- 
hood. Of that purpose Paradise Lost was the full attainment. 
We need not trace its history here. It suffices to observe that 
the poem was begun about 1658 ; was finished in 1663, the year 
of Milton's third 1 marriage; revised from 1663 to 1665; and 
eventually issued in 1667. Before its publication Milton had 
commenced (in the autumn of 1665) its sequel Paradise Re- 
gained, which in turn was closely followed by Samson Agonistes. 
The completion of Paradise Regaiiied may be assigned to the 
year 1666 — that of Samson Agonistes to 1667. Some time was 
spent in their revision; and in January, 1671, they were pub- 
lished together, in a single volume. 

In 1673 Milton brought out a reprint of the 1645 edition of 
Close of Mil- n ^ s Poems, adding most of the sonnets written in 
tons life. tne interval. The last four years of his life were 

devoted to prose works of no particular interest to us 2 . He 
continued to live in London. His third marriage had proved 
happy, and he enjoyed something of the renown which, was 
rightly his. Various well-known men used to visit him — 
notably Dryden 3 , who on one of his visits asked and received 

1 Milton's second marriage took place in the autumn of 1656, i.e. 
after he had become blind. His wife died in February, 1658. Cf. the 
So7znet, "Methought I saw my late espoused saint," the pathos of which 
is heightened by the fact that he had never seen her. 

2 The treatise on Christian Doctrine is valuable as throwing much 
light on the theological views expressed in the two epic poems and 
Samson Agonistes. The discovery of the MS. of this treatise in 1823 
gave Macaulay an opportunity of writing his famous essay on Milton. 

3 The lines by Dryden which were printed beneath the portrait of 
Milton in Tonson's folio edition of Paradise Lost published in 1688 are 
too familiar to need quotation ; but it is worth noting that the younger 
poet had in Milton's lifetime described the great epic as "one of the 
most noble, and most sublime poems which either this age or nation 
has produced" (preface to The State of Innocence, 1674). Further, 
tradition assigned to Dryden (a Roman Catholic and a Royalist) the 
remark, "this fellow (Milton) cuts us all out and the ancients too." 



LIFE OF MILTON. xxiil 

permission to dramatise 1 Paradise Lost. It does not often 
happen that a university can point to two such poets among 
her living sons, each without rival in his generation. 

Milton died in 1674, November 8th. He was buried in St 
Giles' Church, Cripplegate. When we think of him 

_ ; _ VT , ,. , ,.„ r His death. 

we have to think of a man who lived a life of very 
singular purity and devotion to duty; who for what he con- 
ceived to be his country's good sacrificed — and no one can 
well estimate the sacrifice — during twenty years the aim that 
was nearest to his heart and best suited to his genius ; who, 
however, eventually realised his desire of writing a great work 
in gloriam Dei. 

1 See Marvell's "Commendatory Verses," 17 —30, to Paradise Lost. 



XXIV INTRODUCTION. 



MILTON'S SONNETS. 

Ten of the sonnets were published in the first edition of 
_, „ Milton's minor poems (164;). Of the other thir- 

The Sonnets: r V W 

when pub- teen, composed between 1645 and 1658, nine 
appeared in the second edition of the minor poems 
(1673). Four of them ( xv -> xvi -j XYii. 1 , xxii.) it was inex- 
pedient to publish then on account of their political tone. 
They were printed in 1694 by Edward Phillips in the volume 
containing his Life of Milton and translation of the Letters of 
State. The history of all the sonnets, so far as it is known, is 
given in the Notes. 

In respect of structure, there are two main types of sonnet in 

Types of English — the Petrarchan and the Shakespearean : 

Sonnet: Milton's sonnets belong, substantially, to the former ; 

he speaks of his second sonnet as written " in a Petrarchian " 

manner 2 . 

The Petrarchan sonnet is the more elaborate. It is composed 
The " Petrar- of two systems, the octave and the sestet, between 
chan. which a certain balance of thought and cadence 

must be maintained. The first eight lines (the octave) are so 
regulated by the prescribed disposition of the rhymes 3 as to 
form one long movement, broken only by a slight pause at the 
end of the fourth line. The marked pause 4 at the close of this 

1 Sonnet XVII. had appeared previously in a Life of Vane ; see p. 5 1. 

2 See p. 31. 

3 Lines 1, 4, 5, 8 rhyme; and lines 2, 3, 6, 7. The rhyme of the 
first and eighth lines binds together the whole octave, making one 
movement of the eight verses. 

4 The one important respect in which Milton diverges from the 
Petrarchan sonnet is his neglect of this pause. In about half his 
sonnets he carries on the thought and rhythm of the octave into 
the sestet without any break. See sonnets I., XI., XII., XVI., xvn., 
XVIII., XIX., XXII., xxiii. Also he often has no pause at the end of 
the fourth line; in the Petrarchan sonnet this pause is of much less 
consequence than the other. 



MILTON S SONNETS. XXV 

movement necessarily makes a climax : the sonnet reaches its 
high-water point of thought and rhythm, and then falls gradu- 
ally away. The sestet continues, but adds no fresh element to, 
the thought embodied in the octave, and its rhythm is of a 
simpler character, suggesting an impression of leaving off. The 
sestet, in fact, is subordinate to the octave. Its disposition of 
rhymes is not limited so strictly : but the last two lines may not 
form a rhymed couplet. 

The Shakespearean sonnet 1 is less complex. It consists 
merely of four quatrains of alternate rhyme, xiie Shake- 
rounded off with a rhymed distich at the end 2 . s P earean - 
It presents no equivalent to the prolonged and involved move- 
ment of the Petrarchan octave, or to the adjustment between 
the octave and the sestet. Structurally there is no reason why 
any marked pause should occur regularly at one particular place 
in the first twelve lines: the three quatrains may be of equal 
importance. Hence the climax is deferred till the end. It comes 
in the final couplet, which from its position and its rhyme 
takes to itself the main emphasis of the poem. And herein, 
according to many critics, lies the great objection to the Shake- 
spearean sonnet. The interest (they say) of a sonnet should be-^ ,, 
spread over the whole, not concentrated in a single couplet as 
though the piece were an epigram. 

It is scarcely profitable, however, to disparage the Shake- 
spearean sonnet, with Shakespeare's work before 
us to shew what exquisite possibilities it offers, qualities of the 
Rather, we should recognise that the two types of wo 
sonnet possess different qualities 3 — the Shakespearean sonnet 

1 It is so called because Shakespeare's sonnets are the most famous 
examples of the type; he did not invent it. It was used also by Thomas 
Watson, Drayton, Drummond, and many Elizabethans. Hallam speaks 
of "a scanty number of Italian precedents" for this form {Literature 
of Europe, in. 26$, ed. 1879). 

2 Only one (xvi.) of Milton's sonnets ends thus. 

3 "The quest of the Shakespearean sonnet is not, like that of 
the sonnet >f octave and sestet, sonority, but sweetness" — Theodore 
Watts. 



XXVI INTRODUCTION. 

the quality of sweetness, and the Petrarchan the quality of 
complex harmony. And we may perhaps add that, differing 
thus in kind, they ought accordingly to be made to serve 
different purposes. The Shakespearean sonnet seems more 
adapted to a series in which the same theme is treated from 
different aspects. The sonnet then becomes a stanza almost, 
and in a series of stanzas read consecutively something simpler 
than the carefully balanced octave and sestet is required. 
This is supplied by the arrangement of the three quatrains 
finished off with that rhymed couplet which the ear gets to 
anticipate and were loth to miss. On the other hand, where 
a sonnet stands independent, the individual and complete ex- 
pression of some single thought or fancy, there is scope for a 
»more involved mechanism. All 1 Milton's sonnets, it will be 
observed, are of this individual character. Each handles one 
main idea in such a way as to be self-sufficing; there is no 
dependence on anything that precedes or follows. Herein he is 
unlike the Elizabethan sonnetteers, many of whom composed 

sonnet-sequences 2 . He is unlike them too in his 
and style* ° of choice of themes and in his straightforward lucidity 
%%*""'* son ~ of style. On these points Mr Mark Pattison has 

the following admirable summary: — 
" The effectiveness of Milton's sonnets is chiefly due to 
the real nature of the character, person, or incident of which 
each is the delineation. Each person, thing, or fact, is a 
moment in Milton's life, on which he was stirred; sometimes 
in the soul's depths, sometimes on the surface of feeling, but 
always truly moved. He found the sonnet enslaved to a single 
theme, that of unsuccessful love, mostly a simulated passion. 
He emancipated it, and, as Landor says, gave the 'notes to glory.' 

1 Sonnet xil. is only an apparent exception. It may be read 
independently of XL, though it gains by being taken in connection 
therewith. 

2 Cf. Spenser's A?noretti; Sidney's A strophel and Stella; Constable's 
Diana; Watson's Tears of Fane ie ; Drayton's Idea ; and several minor 
collections which Professor Arber has republished in his English 
Garner, vols. v. — vil. 



MILTONS SONNETS. XXVll 

And what is here felt powerfully, is expressed directly and 
simply. The affectation of the Elizabethan sonnet, its elaborate 
artifice, is discarded, and replaced by a manly straightforward- 
ness... The sonnet, the most artificial of our poetic forms, here, 
for the first time in English, offers its purport with the simplicity 
of blank verse. Previous English sonnetteers seem to have 
thought it necessary to match the complexity of the form with 
an equally elaborate involution of the sense. Their sonnets are 
works of ingenuity, offering a problem to the intelligence, rather 
than an excitant to the imagination... After his first essay, 
Sonnet I., Milton threw aside the fashionable model of the 
preceding age. In all his sonnets there is not a proposition 
of which the meaning is doubtful, or the construction intricate. 
He chose deliberately to write thus, when the weight of the 
precedent of the English sonnet was the other way, and when 
it was considered to be essential to that form of poem to eschew 
the direct and the obvious. It is the glory of the Miltonic 
sonnet that being based upon what is common and simple it 
attains to the high and noble 1 ." 

Milton's Sonnets may be divided into three groups, "the 
controversial," "the personal," and "the political." Three Groups 
The first of these groups (Sonnets XL, XII. and of the Sonnets. 
" The New Forcers ") are the least interesting, at once from the 
nature of their several subjects and the grim ungain- . , 

J & b Controversial 

liness that usually characterises Milton s attempts 

at humour. To the other groups Mr Stopford Brooke introduces 

us thus: 

" The personal sonnets have great and solemn beauty, the 
beauty that belongs to the revelation of a great 

. . ,„ „ , & Personal 

spirit. We may well compare the second sonnet, 
with its quiet self-confidence, its resolved humility, its aspiration 
to perform the great Task-master's work, with the sonnet written, 
twenty years after, on his blindness, in 1652. It looks back 

1 This criticism is not, of course, meant to apply to the three con- 
troversial Sonnets, which, as has been happily said, " are less poetry 
, than rhymed passages from the polemical treatises." But the criticism 
is eminently true of the Miltonic Sonnet in general. 



XXVlll INTRODUCTION. 

over many sorrows and tumults to the earlier one; and, de- 
pressed by his blindness, he thinks how little has been, and 
may now be done; but deep religious patience helps him to 
think that God works, and that i They also serve who- only^ 
stand and wait/ Not less noble in thought, not less stately in 
expression, but full of the veteran's consciousness of work, is 
the sonnet written three years later to Cyriack Skinner, also on 
his blindness. He does not bate one jot of hope, but steers 
right onward... The sonnet written when the Assault was 
intended to the City, and three others, written to Lawes, and 
Mr Lawrence, and Cyriack Skinner, may also be called per- 
sonal 1 . They show Milton in his artist nature as the poet 
who knew his own worth; as the lover of music and as the 
musician ; the lover of Italy, of Dante's poem, and of Tuscan 
airs ; the tender friend ; the lover of classic verse. No 
sonnets in the English tongue come nearer than • those to 
Lawrence and Cyriack Skinner to the mingled festivity and 
serious grace of Horace, and their religious spirit, graver than 
that of Horace, makes them Miltonic. 

" Of the political sonnets, the finest 2 is that to Cromwell. 

„ . Those to Fairfax and Vane are 'noble odes ' but 

Political. . . ' 

that to Cromwell is written like an organ song by 
Handel in his triumphant hour. More solemn still, and justly 
called a psalm, is the stern and magnificent summons to God to 
avenge His slaughtered saints, slain by the bloody Piedmontese. 
It is harsh, some have said; nay, it is of great Nature herself: 
it has i a voice whose sound is like the sea. ,,J 

1 I think that we may put Sonnets IX., x., xiv., XXIII. under this 
heading, though Mr Brooke (whose classification I have followed, 
except in this point) groups them together in a separate class depicting 
"four beautiful types of womanhood." 

2 More often, I fancy, the palm is awarded to Sonnet XVIII. 



CRITICISMS ON MILTON S SONNETS. XXIX 



A SELECTION OF CRITICISMS ON MILTON'S 
SONNETS 1 . 

JOHNSON: "The Sonnets were written in different parts of 
Milton's life, upon different occasions. They deserve not any 
particular criticism ; for of the best it can only be said, that they 
are not bad; and perhaps only the eighth 2 and the twenty-first 3 
are truly entitled to this slender commendation. The fabrick of 
a sonnet, however adapted to the Italian language, has never 
succeeded in ours, which, having greater variety of termination, 
requires the rhymes to be often changed. 

Those little pieces may be dispatched without much anxiety; 
a greater work calls for greater care 4 . I am now to examine 
Paradise Lost ; a poem, which, considered with respect to 
design, may claim the first place, and with respect to per- 
formance the second, among the productions of the human 
mind" {Life of Milton). 

Boswell records "a lively saying of Dr Johnson to Miss 
Hannah More, who had expressed a wonder that the poet who 
had written Paradise Lost, should write such poor sonnets : 
' Milton, madam, was a genius that could cut a Colossus from 
a rock, but could not carve heads upon cherry-stones'" (Life 
of Johnson, under the year 1784, Napier's ed. IV. 392). 

1 I have thought that it would add much to the value of this volume 
if what is said or quoted in the foregoing pages were supplemented in 
the present edition (1904) by a tolerably representative resume of critical 
opinion on the Sonnets. 

2 "When the Assault." 

3 " To Cyriack Skinner." 

4 In fairness to Johnson one must quote the remainder of the 
paragraph, which proves that he was not insensible to Milton's great- 
ness. It is mainly in his treatment of Milton's minor poems that 
Johnson is so depreciatory and infelicitous. See Introductions to Comus, 
pp. xl, xli, xliv, xlv, and Lycidas, pp. xlvi, xlvii (Pitt Press eds.). 



XXX INTRODUCTION. 

Macaulay 1 : "Traces of the peculiar character of Milton 
may be found in all his works; but it is most strongly displayed 
in the Sonnets. Those remarkable poems have been under- 
valued by critics who have not understood their nature. They 
have no epigrammatic point. There is none of the ingenuity of 
Filicaja 2 in the thought, none of the hard and brilliant enamel 
of Petrarch in the style. They are simple but majestic records 
of the feelings of the poet ; as little tricked out for the public 
eye as his diary would have been 3 . A victory, an unexpected 
attack upon the city, a momentary fit of depression or exulta- 
tion, a jest thrown out against one of his books, a dream which 
for a short time restored to him that beautiful face over which 
the grave had closed for ever, led him to musings which, without 
effort, shaped themselves into verse. The unity of sentiment 
and severity of style which characterise these little pieces 
remind us of the Greek Anthology, or perhaps still more of the 
Collects of the Anglican Liturgy. The noble poem on the 
Massacres of Piedmont is strictly a Collect in verse. 

The Sonnets are more or less striking, according as the 
occasions which gave birth to them are more or less interesting. 
But they are, almost without exception, dignified by a sobriety 
and greatness of mind to which we know not where to look for 
a parallel. It would, indeed, be scarcely safe to draw any 
decided inferences as to the character of a writer from passages 

1 The fashion is to sneer at Macaulay as a critic. One has all the 
more pleasure therefore in citing a passage which, written in 1S25, 
shows that to Macaulay belongs the credit of being one of the first (if 
not the first) of prose-critics to do justice to Milton's Sonnets and reverse 
the 18th century verdict, as expressed by Johnson and Steevens. 

2 The Italian lyrical poet (1642 — 1707). "Some of his patriotic 
sonnets are famous; but his verse, though not without beauty and 
spirit, is disfigured by the rhetorical tricks and false conceits of the 
period." — Chambers's Encyclopedia. One of Filicaia's Sonnets is 
rendered in Childe Harold IV. xlii (" Italia! oh, Italia "), xliii. 

3 From the Cambridge MSS, with their numerous corrections, we 
see that the seeming simplicity of the Sonnets is really the art that 
conceals art. 






CRITICISMS ON MILTON'S SONNETS. xxxi 

directly egotistical. But the qualities which we have ascribed 
to Milton 1 , though perhaps most strongly marked in those parts 
of his works which treat of his personal feelings, are distinguish- 
able in every page, and impart to all his writings, prose and 
poetry, English, Latin, and Italian, a strong family likeness." 

Hallam : " The Sonnets of Milton have obtained of late 
years the admiration of all real lovers of poetry. Johnson has 
been as impotent to fix the public taste in this instance as in his 
other criticisms on the smaller poems of the author or Paradise 
Lost. These Sonnets are indeed unequal ; the expression is 
sometimes harsh, and sometimes obscure ; sometimes too much 
of pedantic allusion interferes with the sentiment, nor am I 
reconciled to his frequent deviations from the best Italian 
structure. But such blemishes are lost in the majestic simplicity, 
the holy calm, that ennoble many of these short compositions." 

Masson : "An early student of the Italian poets, Milton had 
learnt the true music of the Sonnet from Petrarch most of all, 
so that, when he first ventured on trials of the Sonnet-form in 
English, he thought of it as the ' Petrarchian Stanza.' These 
first trials were made while he was still a Cambridge student, 
long before that ' damp ' fell round his path of which Wordsworth 
speaks as being already round it when he seized the Sonnet and 
the thing in his hands became a trumpet. The series of his 
Sonnets, however, though beginning about 1630, extends to 
1658; and most of them were those 'soul-animating strains' 
which he blew at intervals from this instrument when other 
poetry was in forced abeyance from himfand he was engrossed 
in prose polemics. Milton's last sixteen Sonnets, indeed, with 
a verse or two besides, are the few occasional strains that 
connect, as by intermittent trumpet-blasts through twenty years, 
the rich minor poetry of his youth and early manhood with 
the greater poetry of his declining age in blindness after the 
Restoration." 

COURTHOPE: "Milton. ..returned home [from Italy] to find 
the tide of anti-Episcopal feeling in England running at its height, 

1 e.g. "The character of Milton was peculiarly distinguished by 
loftiness of spirit... His temper was serious, perhaps stern." 



xxxn INTRODUCTION. 

and, with the powerful Puritan bias in his nature, he felt that 
he must take part in the conflict. It is evident, from what he 
says in [his Reason of Church Government, 1641], that he did 
not expect to be long detained from the pursuit of the art to 
which he was devoted, and had no suspicion that for nearly 
twenty years he would be plunged into a whirlpool of controversy 
and civil conflict, in which the only outlet for his imagination 
would be found in the composition of his sonnets. These, from 
the biographical point of view alone, are of the highest value. 
They fall readily into distinct classes ; some being purely 
personal in feeling, such as vii, xix, xxii, xxiii ; others being 
written in compliment to friends, such as those to A Virtuous 
Young Lady; The Lady Margaret Ley; H. Lawes; Cyriac 
Skinner; Mr Lawrence; or The Memory of Mrs Catheri7ie 
Thomson; the largest group having its origin in the praise of 
party leaders, or in passing phases of religious and political 
warfare, the most notable of which are viii, xi, xii, xv, xvi, xvii, 
xviii, and the irregular sonnet On the New Forcers of Conscieiice 
under the Long Parliament. Read in the light of the dates of 
their composition, and in connection with the numerous prose 
pamphlets written by Milton from 1641 to 1658, the sonnets 
furnish the key to the development of his genius between the 
day when he bade farewell to pastoral poetry and that on which 
he began to lay the foundation of Paradise Lost." 

"The Spectator" (August 18, 1883): "The sweetness of the 
early sonnetteers is not to be found in Milton. For the first time 
in our sonnet literature all artifice has disappeared. He has 
used the form to express personal feeling, and even ardent 
passion, but not the passion of love. Ingenuity of fancy is 
discarded, there are no conceits in these poems, and no sign 
that Milton used the sonnet as a conventional form of verse.... 
Milton, who ranks with the greatest writers of sonnets, is 
uniformly intelligible. He knows what he wishes to utter, and 
expresses it with what may seem bald simplicity, but is in truth 
the perfection of art.... A sonnet with one obscure line lacks 
the perfection we are entitled to look for in so short a poem. ,, 



MILTON'S SONNETS. 



M. S. 



Milton ! thou shouldst be living at this houi : 

England hath need of thee : she is a fen 

Of stagnant waters : altar, sword, and pen, 

Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower, 

Have forfeited their ancient English dower 

Of inward happiness. We are selfish men : 

Oh ! raise us up, return to us again ; 

And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power. 

Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart : 

Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea: 

Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free, 

So didst thou travel on life's common way, 

In cheerful godliness ; and yet thy heart 

The lowliest duties on herself did lay. — 

Wordsworth. 



Scorn not the Sonnet ; Critic, you have frowned, 

Mindless of its just honours ; with this key 

Shakespeare unlocked his heart; the melody 

Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch's wound ; 

A thousand times this pipe did Tasso sound ; 

Camoens soothed with it an exile's grief; 

The Sonnet glittered a gay myrtle leaf 

Amid the cypress with which Dante crowned 

His visionary brow : a glow-worm lamp, 

It cheered mild Spenser, called from Faery-land 

To struggle through dark ways; and, when a damp 

Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand 

The Thing became a trumpet, whence he blew 

Soul-animating strains — alas, too few ! — 

Wordsworth. 



I. 



TO THE NIGHTINGALE. 

O nightingale, that on yon bloomy spray 

Warblest at eve, when all the woods are still; 
Thou with fresh hope the lover's heart dost fill, 
While the jolly hours lead on propitious May: 

Thy liquid notes that close the eye of day, 5 

First heard before the shallow cuckoo's bill, 
Portend success in love ; Oh, if Jove's will 
Have linked that amorous power to thy soft lay, 

Now timely sing, ere the rude bird of hate 

Foretell my hopeless doom in some grove nigh \ 10 

As thou from year to year hast sung too late 

For my relief, yet hadst no reason why: 

Whether the Muse, or Love, call thee his mate, 
Both them I serve, and of their train am I. 



SONNETS. 



II. 



ON HIS BEING ARRIVED TO THE AGE OF TWENTY-THREE. 

How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth, 

Stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year! 

My hasting days fly on with full career, 

But my late spring no bud or blossom shew'th. 

Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth, 
That I to manhood am arrived so near; 
And inward ripeness doth much less appear, 
That some more timely-happy spirits endu'th. 

Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow, 

It shall be still in strictest measure even 10 

To that same lot, however mean or high, 

Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heaven; 
All is, if I have grace to use it so, 
As ever in my great Task-Master's eye. 



SONNETS. 



III. 



Donna leggiadra, il cui bel nome onora 
L' erbosa val di Reno e il nobil varco, 
Bene e colui d' ogni valore scarco 
Qual tuo spirto gentil non innamora, 

Che dolcemente mostra si di fuora, 5 

De' sui atti soavi giammai parco, 
E i don', che son d' amor saette ed arco, 
Laonde V alta tua virtu s' infiora. 

Quando tu vaga parli, o lieta canti, 

Che mover possa duro alpestre legno, 10 

Guardi ciascun a gli occhi ed a gli orecchi 

L' entrata chi di te si truova indegno; 
Grazia sola di su gli vaglia, innanti 
Che '1 disio amoroso al cuor s' invecchi. 



SONNETS. 



IV. 



Qual in colle aspro, al imbrunir di sera, 
L' avvezza giovinetta pastorella 
Va bagnando Y erbetta strana e bella 
Che mal si spande a disusata spera, 

Fuor di sua natia alma primavera, 5 

Cosi Amor meco insli la lingua snella 
Desta il fior novo di strania favella, 
Mentre io di te, vezzosamente altera, 

Canto, dal mio buon popol non inteso, 

E '1 bel Tamigi cangio col bel Arno. 10 

Amor lo volse, ed io, a Y altrui peso, 

Seppi ch' Amor cosa mai volse indarno. 

Deh ! foss' il mio cuor lento e' 1 duro seno 
A chi pianta dal ciel si buon terreno. 



SONNETS. 



Canzone. 

Ridonsi donne e giovani amorosi, 

M' accostandosi attorno, e 'Perche scrivi, 

Perche tu scrivi in lingua ignota e strana, 

Verseggiando d' amor, e come t' osi? 

Dinne, se la tua speme sia mai vana, 5 

E de' pensieri lo miglior t' arrivi ! ' 

Cos! mi van burlando : ' altri rivi, 

Altri lidi t' aspettan, ed altre onde, 

Nelle cui verdi sponde 

Spuntati ad or ad or a la tua chioma 10 

U immortal guiderdon d' eterne frondi. 

Perche alle spalle tue soverchia soma?' 

Canzon, dirotti, e tu per me rispondi : 
'Dice mia Donna, e '1 suo dir e il mio cuore, 
" Questa e lingua di cui si vanta Amore."' 15 



SONNETS. 



V. 



Diodati (e te '1 dirb con maraviglia), 

Quel ritroso io, ch' amor spreggiar solea 

E de' suoi lacci spesso mi ridea, 

Gia caddi, ov' uom dabben talor s' impiglia. 

Nfe treccie d' oro, ne guancia vermiglia 
M' abbaglian si, ma sotto nova idea 
Pellegrina bellezza che ? 1 cuor bea, 
Portamenti alti onesti, e nelle ciglia 

Quel sereno fulgor d' amabil nero, 

Parole adorne di lingua piii d' una, io 

E '1 cantar che di mezzo V emispero 

Traviar ben pub la faticosa Luna; 

E degli occhi suoi avventa s\ gran fuoco 
Che V incerar gli orecchi mi fia poco 



SONNETS. 9 



VI. 



Per certo 1 bei vostr' occhi, Donna mia, 

Esser non puo che non sian lo mio sole; 

Si mi percuoton forte, come ei suole 

Per V arene di Libia chi s' invia, 
Mentre un caldo vapor (ne sent! pria) 5 

Da quel lato si spinge ove mi duole, 

Che forse amanti nelle lor parole 

Chiaman sospir; io non so che si sia. 
Parte rinchiusa e turbida si cela 

Scossomi il petto, e poi n' uscendo poco io 

Quivi d' attorno o s' agghiaccia o s' ingiela; 
Ma quanto agli occhi giunge a trovar loco 

Tutte le notti a me suol far piovose, 

Finche mia alba rivien colma di rose. 



10 SONNETS. 



VII. 



Giovane, piano, e semplicetto amante, 

Poiche fuggir me stesso in dubbio sono, 

Madonna, a voi del mio cuor Y umil dono 

Faro divoto. Io certo a prove tante 
L' ebbi fedele, intrepido, costante, 5 

Di pensieri leggiadro, accorto, e buono. 

Quando rugge il gran mondo, e scocca il tuonj, 

S' arma di se, e d' intero diamante, 
Tanto del forse e d' invidia sicuro, 

Di timori, e speranze al popol use, 10 

Quanto d' ingegno e d' alto valor vago, 
E di cetra sonora, e delle Muse. 

Sol troverete in tal parte men duro 

Ove Amor mise 1' insanabil ago. 



SONNETS. II 



VIII. 

WHEN THE ASSAULT WAS INTENDED TO THE CITY. 

Captain, or Colonel, or Knight in arms, 

Whose chance on these defenceless doors may seize, 

If deed of honour did thee ever please, 

Guard them, and him within protect from harms. 

He can requite thee; for he knows the charms 
That call fame on such gentle acts as these, 
And he can spread thy name o'er lands and seas, 
Whatever clime the sun's bright circle warms. 

Lift not thy spear against the Muses' bower : 
The great Emathian conqueror bid spare 
The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower 

Went to the ground; and the repeated air 
Of sad Electra's poet had the power 
To save the Athenian walls from ruin bare. 



12 SONNETS. 



IX. 



TO A VIRTUOUS YOUNG LADY. 



Lady, that in the prime of earliest youth 

Wisely hast shunned the broad way and the green, 
And with those few art eminently seen 
That labour up the hill of heavenly Truth ; 

The better part with Mary and with Ruth 5 

Chosen thou hast: and they that overween, 
And at thy growing virtues fret their spleen, 
No anger find in thee, but pity and ruth. 

Thy care is fixed, and zealously attends 

To fill thy odorous lamp with deeds of light, 10 

And hope that reaps not shame. Therefore be sure 

Thou, when the Bridegroom with his feastful friends 
Passes to bliss at the mid-hour of night, 
Hast gained thy entrance, Virgin wise and pure. 



SONNETS. 13 



X. 



TO THE LADY MARGARET LEY. 



Daughter to that good Earl, once President 
Of England's Council and her Treasury, 
Who lived in both unstained with gold or fee, 
And left them both, more in himself content, 

Till the sad breaking of that Parliament 
Broke him, as that dishonest victory 
At Chaeronea, fatal to liberty, 
Killed with report that old man eloquent; 

Though later born than to have known the days 
Wherein your father flourished, yet by you, 
Madam, methinks I see him living yet : 

So well your words his noble virtues praise 

That all both judge you to relate them true 
And to possess them, honoured Margaret. 






14 SONNETS. 



XL 



ON THE DETRACTION WHICH FOLLOWED UPON MY WRITING 
CERTAIN TREATISES. 

A book was writ of late called Tetrachordon, 

And woven close, both matter, form, and style; 
The subject new : it walked the town a while, 
Numbering good intellects; now seldom pored on. 

Cries the stall-reader, " Bless us ! what a word on 5 

A title-page is this ! " ; and some in file 
Stand spelling false, while one might walk to Mile- 
End Green. Why, is it harder, sirs, than Gordon^ 

Colkitto, or Macdonnel, or Galasp ? 

Those rugged names to our like mouths grow sleek 10 
That would have made Quintilian stare and gasp. 

Thy age, like ours, O soul of Sir John Cheek, 
Hated not learning worse than toad or asp, 
When thou taught'st Cambridge and King Edward Greek. 



SONNETS. 15 



XII. 



ON THE SAME. 



I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs 
By the known rules of ancient liberty, 
When straight a barbarous noise environs me 
Of owls and cuckoos, asses, apes, and dogs ; 

As when those hinds that were transformed to frogs 
Railed at Latona's twin-born progeny, 
Which after held the sun and moon in fee. 
But this is got by casting pearl to hogs, 

That bawl for freedom in their senseless mood, 

And still revolt when Truth would set them free. 
Licence they mean when they cry Liberty; 

For who loves that must first be wise and good : 
But from that mark how far they rove we see, 
For all this waste of wealth and loss of blood. 



1 6 SONNETS. 



XIII. 

TO MR H. LAWES ON HIS AIRS. 

Harry, whose tuneful and well-measured song 
First taught our English music how to span 
Words with just note and accent, not to scan 
• With Midas' ears, committing short and long, 

Thy worth and skill exempts thee from the throng, 5 

With praise enough for Envy to look wan; 
To after age thou shalt be writ the man 
That with smooth air couldst humour best our tongue. 

Thou honour'st verse, and verse must lend her wing 

To honour thee, the priest of Phcebus , quire, 10 

That tunest their happiest lines in hymn or story. 

Dante shall give Fame leave to set thee higher 
Than his Casella, whom he wooed to sing, 
Met in the milder shades of Purgatory. 



SONNETS. 17 



XIV. 

ON THE RELIGIOUS MEMORY OF MRS CATHERINE THOMSON, 
MY CHRISTIAN FRIEND, DECEASED DEC. 1 6, 1 646. 

When Faith and Love, which parted from thee never, 
Had ripened thy just soul to dwell with God, 
Meekly thou didst resign this earthy load 
Of death, called life, which us from life doth sever. 

Thy works, and alms, and all thy good endeavour, 5 

Stayed not behind, nor in the grave were trod; 
But, as Faith pointed w r ith her golden rod, 
Followed thee up to joy and bliss for ever. 

Love led them on; and Faith, who knew them best 

Thy handmaids, clad them o'er with purple beams 10 
And azure wings, that up they flew so drest, 

And spake the truth of thee on glorious themes 

Before the Judge; who thenceforth bid thee rest, 
And drink thy fill of pure immortal streams. 



M. s. 



1 8 SONNETS. 



XV. 



TO THE LORD GENERAL FAIRFAX, AT THE SIEGE OF 
COLCHESTER. 

Fairfax, whose name in arms through Europe rings, 
Filling each mouth with envy or with praise, 
And all her jealous monarchs with amaze, 
And rumours loud that daunt remotest kings; 

Thy firm unshaken virtue ever brings 

Victory home, though new rebellions raise 
Their Hydra heads, and the false North displays 
Her broken league to imp their serpent wings. 

O yet a nobler task awaits thy hand 

(For what can war but endless war still breed?) 
Till truth and right from violence be freed, 

And public faith cleared from the shameful brand 
Of public fraud. In vain doth Valour bleed, 
While Avarice and Rapine share the land. 



SONNETS. 19 



XVI. 

TO THE LORD GENERAL CROMWELL, 

ON THE PROPOSALS OF CERTAIN MINISTERS AT THE 
COMMITTEE FOR PROPAGATION OF THE GOSPEL. 

Cromwell, our chief of men, who through a cloud 
Not of war only, but detractions rude, 
Guided by faith and matchless fortitude, 
To peace and truth thy glorious way hast ploughed, 

And on the neck of crowned Fortune proud 

Hast reared God's trophies, and his work pursued, 
While Darwen stream, with blood of Scots imbrued, 
And Dunbar field, resounds thy praises loud, 

And Worcester's laureate wreath : yet much remains 
To conquer still; Peace hath her victories 
No less renowned than War: new foes arise, 

Threatening to bind our souls with secular chains. 
Help us to save free conscience from the paw 
Of hireling wolves, whose Gospel is their maw. 



20 SONNETS. 



. XVII. 

TO SIR HENRY VANE THE YOUNGER. 

Vane, young in years, but in sage counsel old, 
Than whom a better senator ne'er held 
The helm of Rome, when gowns, not arms, repelled 
The fierce Epirot and the African bold; 

Whether to settle peace, or to unfold 5 

The drift of hollow states hard to be spelled; 
Then to advise how war may best upheld 
Move by her two main nerves, iron and gold, 

In all her equipage; besides, to know ^ 

Both spiritual power and civil, what each means, 10 

What severs each, thou hast learned, which few have done. 

The bounds of either sword to thee we owe : 
Therefore on thy firm hand Religion leans 
In peace, and reckons thee her eldest son. 



SONNETS. 21 



XVIII. 

ON THE LATE MASSACRE IN PIEMONT. 

Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered • saints, whose bones 
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold; 
Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old, 
When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones, 

Forget not : in thy book record their groans 

Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold 
Slain by the bloody Piemontese, that rolled 
Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans 

The vales redoubled to the hills, and they 

To heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow 
O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway 

The triple Tyrant; that from these may grow 
A hundredfold, who, having learnt thy way, 
Early may fly the Babylonian woe. 






22 SONNETS. 



XIX. 



ON HIS BLINDNESS. 



When I consider how my light is spent 

Ere half my days in this dark world and wide, 
And that one talent which is death to hide 
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent 

To serve therewith my Maker, and present 

My true account, lest He returning chide ; 
"Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?" 
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent 

That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need 

Either man's work or his own gifts. Who best 10 

Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state 

Is kingly : thousands at his bidding speed, 

And post o'er land and ocean without rest; 
They also serve who only stand and wait." 



SONNETS. 2j 



XX. 



TO MR LAWRENCE. 



Lawrence, of virtuous father virtuous son, 

Now that the fields are dank, and ways are mire, 
Where shall we sometimes meet, and by the fire 
Help waste a sullen day, what may be won 

From the hard season gaining? Time will run 5 

On smoother, till Favonius reinspire 
The frozen earth, and clothe in fresh attire 
The lily and rose, that neither sowed nor spun. 

What neat repast shall feast us, light and choice, 

Of Attic taste, with wine, whence we may rise 10 

To hear the lute well touched, or artful voice 

Warble immortal notes and Tuscan air? 

He who of those delights can judge, and spare 
To interpose them oft, is not unwise. 



24 SONNETS. 



XXI. 



TO CYRIACK SKINNER. 



Cyriack, whose grandsire on the royal bench 
Of British Themis, with no mean applause, 
Pronounced, and in his volumes taught, our laws, 
Which others at their bar so often wrench; 

To-day deep thoughts resolve with me to drench 
In mirth that after no repenting draws; 
Let Euclid rest, and Archimedes pause, 
And what the Swede intends, and what the French. 

To measure life learn thou betimes, and know 

Toward solid good what leads the nearest way; 10 

For other things mild Heaven a time ordains, 

And disapproves that care, though wise in show, 
That with superfluous burden loads the day, 
And, when God sends a cheerful hour, refrains. 



SONNETS. 25 



XXII. 



TO THE SAME. 



Cyriack, this three years' day these eyes, though clear, 

To outward view, of blemish or of spot, 

Bereft of light, their seeing have forgot ; 

Nor to their idle orbs doth sight appear 
Of sun, or moon, or star, throughout the year, 5 

Or man, or woman. Yet I argue not 

Against Heaven's hand or will, nor bate a jot 

Of heart or hope, but still bear up and steer 
Right onward. What supports me, dost thou ask? 

The conscience, friend, to have lost them overplied 10 

In Liberty's defence, my noble task, 
Of which all Europe talks from side to side. 

This thought might lead me through the world's vain mask 

Content, though blind, had I no better guide. 



26 SONNETS. 



XXIII. 



ON HIS DECEASED WIFE. 



Methought I saw my late espoused saint 

Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave, 
Whom Jove's great son to her glad husband gave, 
Rescued from Death by force, though pale and faint. 

Mine, as whom washed from spot of child-bed taint 
Purification in the Old Law did save, 
And such as yet once more I trust to have 
Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint, 

Came vested all in white, pure as her mind. 

Her face was veiled; yet to my fancied sight 10 

Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shined 

So clear as in no face with more delight. 

But, oh ! as to embrace me she inclined, 

I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night. 



SONNETS. 27 



ON THE NEW FORCERS OF CONSCIENCE UNDER THE LONG 
PARLIAMENT. 

Because you have thrown off your Prelate Lord, 
And with stiff vows renounced his Liturgy, 
To seize the widowed whore Plurality 
From them whose sin ye envied, not abhorred; 

Dare ye for this adjure the civil sword 5 

To force our consciences that Christ set free, 
And ride us with a classic hierarchy, 
Taught ye by mere A. S. and Rutherford? 

Men whose life, learning, faith, and pure intent, 

Would have been held in high esteem with Paul 10 
Must now be named and printed heretics 

By shallow Edwards and Scotch What-d'ye-call ! 
But we do hope to find out all your tricks, 
Your plots and packing, worse than those of Trent, 

That so the Parliament 15 

May with their wholesome and preventive shears 

Clip your phylacteries, though baulk your ears, 

And succour our just fears, 

When they shall read this clearly in your charge : 

New "Presbyter" is but old "Priest" writ large. 20 



NOTES. 



First printed in 1645; written perhaps about 1630 — 1631. As 
Milton placed it first among the Sonnets published in 1645, its com " 
position must have preceded that of the Sonnet " On his being arrived," 
the probable date of which is December 1631. 

The subject of the. Sonnet is the old superstition that to hear the 
nightingale earlier in the year than the cuckoo (which, as a rule, arrives 
first) portends good fortune in love. Cf. Burton, describing a lover on 
whom his mistress has smiled favourably, " he is too confident and rapt 
beyond himself, as if he had heard the Nightingale in the Spring before 
the Cuckow " (Analo?ny of Melancholy, vol. II. p. 302, ed. 1800). 
Milton had read Chaucer's poem The Cuckow and the Nightingale ; cf. 
the following stanza : 

"But as I lay this other nyght wakynge 
I thoght how lovers had a tokenynge, 
And among hem hit was a comune tale, 
That hit wer good to here the nyghtyngale, 
Rather then the leude cukkow synge." 

The lover who is supposed to say this goes out in hopes of hearing 
the nightingale, and does — but not before the note of the cuckoo has 
surprised him. Then, falling into a kind of * swoon', he listens to a 
dialogue between the nightingale and cuckoo, on the "service of 
Love"; cf. the last couplet of this Sonnet. 

Milton seems to have had a peculiar fondness for the nightingale, if 
we may judge by the number of references to the bird in his poems ; cf. 
P. Z. in. 38—40, iv. 602, 603, v. 40, 41, vii. 435, 436. See too the 
lines to the nightingale in 77 Penseroso, 56 — 64, a poem written (1632 
or x ^33) not verv l° n g after this Sonnet and descriptive, in great 
measure, of the poet's own feelings and tastes. 

Of the style of the poem Mr Mark Pattison well remarks : u In this 
sonnet... Milton has not yet shaken himself free from the trick of con- 



30 SONNETS. 

triving ' concetti ' as was the fashion of the previous age, and especially 
of his models, the Italians... [Afterwards] his sense of reality asserted 
itself, and he never again, in the sonnets, lapses into frigid, and far- 
fetched ingenuities." Of the tendency of Milton's earliest style towards 
strained and artificial turns of fancy and phrase ('concetti') such as the 
* metaphysical' school of poets employed, the Nativity Hymn affords 
striking illustrations ; see the Pitt Press edition, Introduction, pp. xxvi, 
xxvii. 

i. nightingale ; literally 'singer by night'; gale coming from A. S. 
galan, to sing, akin to yell, spray; see G. 

2. Cf. P. L. v. 40, "the night-warbling bird," i.e. the nightingale. 
stilly quiet (other birds not singing : cf. The Merchant of Venice, V. 

104 — 106). Still is a favourite epithet with Milton in his early poems; 
cf. lycidas, 187, "the still Morn," II Penseroso, 78, 127. 

3. 4. The nightingale (a migratory bird) comes to England about 
the middle of April ; hence its note is naturally regarded as heralding 
spring. Cf. Milton's poem hi Adventum Veris, 25, 26 : 

jam, Philomela, tuos, foliis adoperta novellis, 
instituis modulos, dum silet omne nemus. 
With the last words (dum silet...) cf. line 2 of this Sonnet. 

4. This allegorical description of the approach of spring is classical. 
The Hours, Lat. Horce, Gk. i3/)cu, were goddesses who personified the 
seasons of the year, the course of which was symbolically called "the 
dance of the Horce." Cf. P. L. IV. 266—268, 

"universal Pan, 
Knit with the Graces and the Hours in dance, 
led on the eternal Spring"; 
also P. L. V. 394, 395, Comus, 984 — 987, and Gray's Ode to Spring. 
jolly, see G. lead on; the metaphor of a dance. 

5. close, i.e. with sleep, the Day (personified) being lulled to rest 
by them. Cf. // Penseroso, 141, "Hide me from Day's garish eye," and 
Comus, 978. Elizabethan writers use "eye of heaven 1 * = the sun; cf. 
Spenser, Faerie Queene, I. 3. 4, " As the great eye of heaven shyned 
bright"; and Shakespeare, Sonnet 18, King John, iv. 2. 15. 

6. heard, if first heard. shallow, stupid ; referring, perhaps, 
specially to the bird's stupid, monotonous cry ; cf. Midsummer- Night' 's 
Dream, ill. 1. 134, " plain-song cuckoo." 

8. Milton elsewhere associates the nightingale with love, speaking 
of it as "the amorous bird of night" (P. L. VIII. 518), and of its song 
as "love-laboured" (P. L. V. 41). 



NOTES. 31 

9. timely ', in good time, early. He calls the cuckoo "the rude 
bird of hate" in allusion to the superstition that its note was unpro- 
pitious to lovers, as also to married people; cf. Midsummer- Night's 
D?'ea?n, in. 1. 134 — 139, Love's Labour's Lost, v. 2. 908. Mr Mark 
Pattison cites George Gascoigne : " I have noted as evil luck in love, 
after the cuckoo's call, to have happened unto divers unmarried folks, 
as ever I did unto the married." There are many curious beliefs about 
the cuckoo; see Brand's Popular Antiquities, Bohn's ed., II. 197, 198. 

11. too late, i.e. after he had already heard the cuckoo. 

13, 14. Suggested by Chaucer's The Cuckow a?id the Nightingale ; 
the cuckoo sneers at love and the nightingale answers : 
"who that wol the god of love not serve, 
I dar wel sey he is worthy for to sterve [ = die]." 
They discuss the point, the nightingale speaking in warm praise "Of 
Love, and of his worshipful servyse." Train (' retinue, followers') is a 
favourite word with M. ; cf. 77 Pen. 10 ("The fickle pensioners of 
Morpheus' train"), S. A. 721, P. L. 1. 478, v. 166 (" Fairest of stars, 
last in the train of night "). 

II. 

First printed 1645; written just after — perhaps, on — December 9, 
1631, Milton's twenty-third birthday. The Sonnet, in his handwriting, 
occurs in the Cambridge MSS., and there forms part of a letter in prose 
to one of his friends. 

Milton had taken his B.A. degree two years previously and had 
remained at the University for further study. The unknown friend to 
whom the letter is addressed (possibly it was never sent) had evidently 
urged that this period of indefinite study should close, and that Milton 
should, as the saying is, 'do something' — e.g. carry out his original 
intention of entering the Church. Milton in reply, while defending 
study as the means of making him "more fit" for the higher purposes 
of life, admits that his friend's remonstrance is reasonable: "I am 
something suspicious of myself, and do take notice of a certain belated- 
ness in me." As a proof, he inserts the Sonnet (composed -"some 
little while ago... in a Petrarchian stanza"), in which he had expressed 
this feeling of " belatedness" very clearly. Cf. "late spring," 1. 4. 

The great interest of the poem lies, I think, in its last six lines. 
The dominating idea of Milton's life was his resolve to use his high 
gifts for the glory of God, and to achieve this object by writing a great 
poem. He feels an intense responsibility to do something worthy, and 



32 SONNETS. 

it is revealed plainly in this Sonnet, which has been well called " an 
inseparable part of Milton's autobiography." See pp. xii, xiii. 

3, career, speed; this was properly a term of horsemanship = a 
short gallop at full speed; used especially of tournaments. 

4, 5. shew' th... truth. For the rhyme, indicating perhaps the pro- 
nunciation of shew then current, cf. Comus, 511, 512: 

Spirit. " Ay me unhappy! then my fears are true. 
Elder Brother. What fears, good Thyrsis? Prithee briefly shew." 
In Comus, 994 — 996 hue, sheiv, dew and true all rhyme. 

5, 6. An allusion to his youthful appearance, which was evidently 
due, in great measure, to his fresh complexion. Cf. Toland's descrip- 
tion of him as "middle sized and well proportioned, his deportment 
erect and manly, his hair of a light brown, his features exactly regular, 
his complexion wonderfully fair when a youth, and ruddy to the very 
last" (Life of Milton, 1698). Cf. also Johnson: "Milton has the 
reputation of having been in his youth eminently beautiful, so as to 
have been called the lady of his college" (i.e. Christ's College, 
Cambridge). 

Milton himself in 1654, replying to the coarse attacks on his 
person, writes: "My face... is of a complexion entirely opposite to the 
pale and cadaverous [as Salmasius had described it]; so that, though I 
am more than forty years old, there is scarcely any one to whom I do 
not appear ten years younger than I am," Second Defence of the People 
of England, P. W. I. 235, 236. deceive, disguise, belie. 

8. timely-happy, fortunate in reaching early maturity. Cf. his 
lines on Shakespeare: 

"to the shame of slow-endeavouring art 
Thy easy numbers flow." 
I suppose that he is there, as perhaps here, contrasting himself with 
Shakespeare, and that the " slow- endeavouring art " is his own. 

9. it, i.e. "inward ripeness" (7). 
10,11. even to, conformable with. 

13. All is, i.e. "even" (10) already: not merely "shall be" (10). 

14. As ever, as being ever. Task- Master ; compare Exodus i. 11, 
iii. 7, v. 6, 10. 

With these last lines compare Sonnet xix. (written before Paradise 
Lost), where Milton laments that the "talent" of poetic genius 
committed to him has not yet been used fully, but that his duty to his 
"great Task-Master" still remains unfulfilled. 

See Appendix, 1. (" Milton's Great Purpose "), pp. 67 — 69. 



NOTES. 33 

Milton's five Italian Sonnets and the * Canzone* (which is usually 
printed with them) were probably written during his stay in Italy 
1638 — 1639. They are rendered thus by Cowper : — 



III. 

Fair Lady ! whose harmonious name the Rhine, 
Through all his grassy vale, delights to hear, 
Base were indeed the wretch, who could forbear 
To love a spirit elegant as thine, 

That manifests a sweetness all divine, 

Nor knows a thousand winning acts to spare, 
And graces, which Love's bow and arrows are, 
Tempering thy virtues to a softer shine. 

When gracefully thou speak'st, or singest gay 
Such strains as might the senseless forest move, 
Ah then — turn each his eyes and ears away 

Who feels himself unworthy of thy love ! 
Grace can alone preserve him, ere the dart 
Of fond desire yet reach his inmost heart. 



IV. 



As on a hill-top rude, when closing day 

Imbrowns the scene, some pastoral maiden fair 
Waters a lovely foreign plant with care, 
Borne from its native genial airs away, 

That scarcely can its tender bud display, 

So, on my tongue these accents, new and rare, 
Are flowers exotic, which Love waters there, 
While thus, O sweetly scornful, I essay 

Thy praise, in verse to British ears unknown, 
And Thames exchange for Arno's fair domain ; 
So Love has willed, and ofttimes love has shown 

That what he wills, he never wills in vain. 
Oh, that this hard and sterile breast might be 
To him who plants from Heaven a soil as free ! 



M. S. 



34 SONNETS. 



CANZONE. 

They mock my toil— the nymphs and amorous swains — 

And whence this fond attempt to write, they cry, 

Love songs in language that thou little know'st? 

How dar'st thou risk to sing these foreign strains? 

Say truly. Find'st not oft thy purpose crossed, 

And that thy fairest flowers here fade and die? 

Then with pretence of admiration high— 

Thee other shores expect and other tides, 

Rivers on whose grassy sides 

Her deathless laurel leaf, with which to bind 

Thy flowing locks, already Fame provides ; 

Why then this burthen, better far declined? 

Speak, Muse, for me. — The fair one said, who guides 

My willing heart and all my fancy's flights, 

* ' This is the language in which Love delights." 



SONNET TO CHARLES DIODATI. 

Charles — and I say it wondering — thou must know 
That I, who once assumed a scornful air, 
That scoffed at love, am fallen in his snare 
(Full many an upright man has fallen so). 

Yet think me not thus dazzled by the flow 
Of golden locks, or damask cheek ; more rare 
The heart-felt beauties of my foreign fair; 
A mien majestic, with dark brows, that show 

The tranquil lustre of a lofty mind ; 

Words exquisite, of idioms more than one, 
And song, whose fascinating power might bind, 

And from her sphere draw down the labouring Moon, 
With such fire-darting eyes, that should I fill 
My ears with wax, she would enchant me still. 



NOTES. 35 



VI. 



Lady, it cannot be, but that thine eyes 

Must be my sun, such radiance they display, 
And strike me even as Phoebus him, whose way 
Through torrid Libya's sandy desert lies. 

Meantime, on that side steamy vapours rise 
Where most I suffer. Of what kind are they, 
New as to me they are, I cannot say, 
But deem them, in the lover's language — sighs. 

Some, though with pain, my bosom close conceals, 
Which, if in part escaping thence, they tend 
To soften thine, thy coldness soon congeals. 

While others to my tearful eyes ascend, 

Whence my sad nights in showers are ever drowned, 
Till my Aurora comes, her brow with roses bound. 



VII. 

Enamoured, artless, young, on foreign ground, 
Uncertain whither from myself to fly, 
To thee, dear Lady, with an humble sigh 
Let me devote my heart, which I have found 

By certain proofs, not few, intrepid, sound, 
Good, and addicted to conceptions high : 
When tempests shake the world, and fire the sky, 
It rests in adamant self-wrapt around, 

As safe from envy, and from outrage rude, 

From hopes and fears, that vulgar minds abuse, 
As fond of genius and fixed fortitude, 

Of the resounding lyre, and every Muse. 
Weak you will find it in one only part, 
Now pierced by Love's immedicable dart. 



36 SONNETS. 



VIII. 

"This Sonnet, the first of those which refer to English public affairs, 
was written in November 1642, and probably on Saturday the 12th of 
that month. The Civil War had then begun; and Milton, already 
known as a vehement Anti-Episcopal pamphleteer [see Introduction, 
p. xv] and Parliamentarian, was living, with two young nephews whom 
he was educating, in his house in Aldersgate Street, a suburban thorough- 
fare just beyond one of the city gates of London. After some of the 
first actions of the war, including the indecisive Battle of Edgehill 
(Oct. 23), the King's army, advancing out of the Midlands, with the 
King and Prince Rupert present in it, had come as near to London as 
Hounslow and Brentford, and was threatening a farther march to crush 
the Londoners and the Parliament at once. They were at their nearest 
on Saturday the 12th of November; and all that day and the next there 
was immense excitement in London in expectation of an assault — chains 
put up across streets, houses barred, &c. It was not till the evening of 
the 13th that the citizens were reassured by the retreat of the King's 
army, which had been checked from a closer advance by a rapid 
march-out of the Trained Bands under Essex and Skippon. Milton, we 
are to fancy, had shared the common alarm. His was one of the houses 
which, if the Cavaliers had been let loose, it would have given them 
particular pleasure to sack." — Masson, 

Aldersgate Street where Milton lived was on the way to Islington. 
It had the great merit, according to Phillips, of being one of the quietest 
streets in London. Milton refers to his "spacious house" with satisfac- 
tion in the Second Defence (P. W. I. 257). 

The heading, " When the assault," in Milton's own writing, is in the 
Cambridge MS., but not in the editions of 1645, 1673. He crossed 
out a heading — " On his dore when ye Citty expected an assault." 

1. Colonel', to be scanned here as 3 syllables. Ital. colonello; lit. 
'a little column ' (colonnd), i.e. prop, support of the regiment. Knight 
in arms ; from Richard II. I. 3. 26. 

2. i.e. to whom chance may assign the opportunity of seizing. 

5 — 8. This promise of fame conferred by poetry is not, coming 
from Milton's pen, a mere piece of hackneyed convention ; nor has it 
anything of arrogance. Milton believes in the power which he attributes 
to poetry (cf. the lines on Shakespeare), and in himself. His greatness 
has the self-consciousness often allied with real humility and a strong 
sense of responsibility. 



NOTES. 37 

5. charms, spells, i.e. the magical effect of poetry ; see G. 

8. whatever clime, in every region which, clime, see G. 

the sun's bright circle; repeated in P. L. IV. 578. circle, orb, 
sphere; the 'ball* of the sun, as we say. 

10. Emathian conqueror, Alexander the Great of Macedonia; lived 
B - c « 356 — 323. Emathia was "a district of Macedonia... and the 
original seat of the Macedonian monarchy. The poets frequently give 
the name of Emathia to the whole of Macedonia" (Classical Dictionary). 
Hence Emathius was applied to Alexander; cf. Ovid's Tristia, III. 5. 39, 
ducts Emathii clevientia. See P. R. III. 290, where Milton speaks of 
the great Seleucia as "built by Emathian... hands," because founded 
by Alexander's Macedonian general, Seleucus. Other allusions to 
Alexander occur in P. R. II. 196—198, in. 31 — 34. 

10 — 12. According to the story told by Pliny, Natural History, VII. 
29, and by other writers, when Alexander captured Thebes in B.C. 333 
and sacked the city, he ordered that the house of the poet Pindar (lived 
B.C. 522 — 442) should be spared. 

Cf. the Glosse to Spenser's Shepheards Calender, October: "Alexander 
destroying Thebes, when he was enformed, that the famous Lyrick poet 
Pindarus was borne in that citie, not onely commaunded streightly, that 
no man should, upon payne of death, do any violence to that house, by 
fire or otherwise: but also specially spared most, and some highly 
rewarded, that were of hys kinne." 

The chief patrons of Pindar, who spent most of his life at Thebes, 
were Alexander of Macedonia, an ancestor of Alexander the Great, and 
Hieron of Syracuse; "and the praises which he bestowed upon the 
former are said to have been the chief reason which led his descendant 
Alexander [the Great] to spare the house of the poet, when he destroyed 
the rest of Thebes " — Classical Dictionary. Alexander had been sent 
in his youth to Athens to study in the school {Lyceum) of Aristotle 
(cf. P. R, IV. 251 — 253); hence he had much sympathy with Greek 
culture. 

For interesting allusions in Milton to Pindar's works see P. R. IV. 
2 56> 257 ; the sixth Elegy, 23 — 26; Church Government, Preface to bk. 
II., P. W. 11. 479. See also Appendix, 11., pp. 69, 70. 

12 — 14. "Plutarch relates, that when the Lacedaemonian general 
Lysander took Athens [B.C. 404], it was proposed in a council of war 
entirely to raze the city, and convert its site into a desert." But while 
the matter was still undecided, " at a banquet of the chief officers, a 
certain Phocian sang some fine [verses] from a chorus of the Electra of 



38 SONNETS. 

Euripides; which so affected the hearers, that they declared it an 
unworthy act to reduce a place, so celebrated for the production of 
illustrious men, to total ruin and desolation. It appears, however, that 
Lysander ordered the walls and fortifications to be demolished" — 
Warton. The verses in question were part of the first chorus of the 
Electro,, 167 et sea. 

Speaking of Milton's learning, Johnson says: " The books in which 
his daughter, who used to read to him, represented him as most 
delighting, after Homer, which he could almost repeat, were Ovid's 
1 Metamorphoses' and Euripides" (Life of Milton). A copy of Euripides 
with MS. notes by Milton is extant, and one of his textual emendations 
— 7]8eu$ for ydiuv in the Bacchtz, 188 — is universally adopted. See 
Dr Sandy s's edition of the Bacchce (Cambridge Press), where in the 
notes on 188, 234 — 236 and 314 — 318 several interesting parallels 
between Comus and parts of Euripides are pointed out. 

Noticeable allusions to Euripides occur in Church Government 
(P. W. 11. 479), On Education (P. W. in. 472, 473), and the Preface to 
Samson Agonistes (lines 58, 59). See too Sonnet xxin., and p. 69. 

12. repeated, recited. 

13. sad; probably it qualifies Electra, the point of the epithet 
being explained by the play Electra. But some refer it to "poet," 
with the common Miltonic sense 'grave, serious. ' 

IX. 

Printed 1645; written about 1643-44. The lady may have been 
a Miss Davis, with whom M. was very friendly (Mark Pattison). 

11 In the Cambridge MS. we find that Milton had originally written 
'blooming virtue 1 for 'growing virtues 9 in line 7, and that line 13 ran 
originally thus : 

1 Opens the door of bliss that hour of night 9 
Both passages are corrected into their present form on the margin" — 
Mas son. 

2. Cf. Matthew vii. 13, 14: "Broad is the way, that leadeth to 
destruction,... and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life." 

the green; i.e. a soft way through grassy, pleasant places, not the 
hard, rough highway; cf. Shakespeare's phrase "the primrose path," 
Hamlet, I. 3. 50 (varied in Macbeth, II. 3. 21). Symbolism of this kind 
is quite in Milton's style. 



NOTES. 39 

We have a similar figurative idea in P. R. I. 478, "Hard are the 
ways of truth, and rough to walk." 

4. the hill of Truth. Suggested by the allegory, as old as the Works 
and Days, 287 et sea. of Hesiod (8th century B.C.), that Virtue dwells on 
a hill steep and difficult of ascent. Cf. P. R. II. 217, "Seated as on 
the top of Virtue's hill." In one of his letters Milton speaks of "that 
steep and rugged way which leads to the pinnacle of Virtue." The Faerie 
Qneene is full of such allegory, e.g. the Hill of Contemplation (1. 10). 

5. Cf. Luke x. 42, "Mary hath chosen that good part"; and 
Ruth i. 14 — 17. 

7, 8. spleen, ill temper, malice, ruth, compassion; see G. 
10 — 14. See the parable of the Virgins, Matthew xxv. 

11. " Hope maketh not ashamed," Romans v. 5. 

12. Cf. Samson Agonistes, 1741, "on feastful days"; i.e. 'feast- 
days,' as we say. So "feastfull glee," The Faerie Queene, VI. 10. 22. 

13. hour; changed in the Cambridge MS. from watch. 

X. 

Written probably 1643 or 1644; the last of the Sonnets printed in 
the edition of 1645. It is among the Cambridge MSS. 

The "good Earl" whose merits the Sonnet celebrates was James 
Ley, first Earl of Marlborough ; a Judge and politician of some distinc- 
tion. Born in 1550, the son of a Devonshire gentleman, he rose to 
various high offices of the law; later, became Lord High Treasurer, 
1624, and was made a Baron — afterwards, 1626, an Earl. Resigning 
the Treasury in 1628, he held for a few months the post of President of 
the Council. He retired from office altogether at the end of 1628 and 
died on March 14, 1629, four days after the dissolution of Charles's 
third Parliament. Milton implies that the event hastened the Earl's 
death. The two highest offices to which he attained are skilfully 
referred to (1 — 4); perhaps, with the implication that he resigned 
rather than be a party to the king's unconstitutional methods. 

His daughter Lady Margaret married a Captain Hobson from 
the Isle of Wight; at the time when this Sonnet was written they 
were living in London. Milton's wife had returned to her father's 
house (see Introduction, p.'xvi.), and, says Phillips, "Our author, 
now as it were a single man again, made it his chief diversion, now 
and then in an evening to visit the Lady Margaret Ley. This lady 
being a woman of great wit and ingenuity, had a particular honour for 



40 SONNETS. 

him and took much delight in his company, as likewise her husband 
Captain Hobson, a very accomplished gentleman ; and what esteem he 
[Milton] at the same time had for her appears by a Sonnet he made in 
praise of her" {Life of Milton, 1694). 

1. Note repetition (1, 5, 6, 8) of that^ i the well-known ' (Lat. ille). 

4. more in himself content ', preferring a private station. 

5. 6. breaking, failure ; or ' breaking up,' dissolution, broke, broke 
down. M., like Shakespeare, uses word-plays to express bitterness. 

6. dishonest= Lat. inhonestus, disgraceful, i.e. to those who won the 
victory: an oxymoron. " Inglorious triumphs and dishonest scars" (Pope). 

7. Chceronea; a town in Boeotia; the scene of the defeat of the 
united army of the Athenians and Boeotians by Philip of Macedon in 
August, 338 B.C. This battle finally put an end to the independence of 
Greece: hence the * dishonour,' Milton says, of winning it. 

8. The allusion is to Isocrates, one of the greatest of Athenian 
orators. "Although Isocrates took no part in public affairs, he was an 
ardent lover of his country; and, accordingly, when the battle of 
Chseronea had destroyed the last hopes of freedom, he put an end to 
his life, B.C. 338, at the age of 98" — Classical Dictionary. But this 
tradition of his suicide does not rest on very sound evidence, according 
to Professor Jebb. 

The title of Milton's Areopagitica is adapted from the \6yos 'Apeoira- 
yirucds, * Areopagitic Discourse,' of Isocrates, who is referred to at the 
outset of the work, and again in On Education (cf. "those ancient and 
famous schools of Pythagoras, Plato, Isocrates, Aristotle"); see P. W. 
II. 52, in. 474. A small portion of the orations of Isocrates is extant. 

old ?nan eloquent. This order of words — a noun placed between two 
qualifying words — is frequent in Milton's works. Cf. " sad occasion 
dear," Lycidas, 6; " towered structure high," P. L. I. 733. We find it 
in Greek; cf. Euripides, Phoeitissae, 234, " vicpbfioXov 8pos ipbv" Gray 
probably imitated Milton; cf. his Elegy, 53, "Full many a gem of 
purest ray serene." There are instances in Tennyson's early poems 
(which reveal Milton's influence often). See Sonnets XV. 5, xviii. 2. 

9. 10. Not to be taken too literally. Milton means that he (born 
1608) was a mere child when the Earl was in his prime ("flourished") 
and rising to high offices. 

to have known, Elizabethan writers use the perfect infinitive to 
express something that might have been but was not, especially with 
verbs of hoping, intending — e.g. " He trusted to have equalled the Most 
High," P. L. 1. 40. See Abbott, Shakesp. Grammar^ p. 259. 



NOTES. 4 1 

XI. 

" The heading was first prefixed to the following Sonnet, which was 
originally numbered ii....In ed. 1673 the order of Sonnets XI. and xn. 
was changed to the present. The first draft [in the Cambridge MS.] is in 
Milton's own hand, and there is a fair copy by another '* — Aldis Wright, 

First printed 1673; written probably about the middle of 1645, as 
the Tetrachordon, " writ of late" was published in March of that year. 

The original draft of the Sonnet differs in several lines from the 
published version, the alterations being shown in the Cambridge MS. 
Thus in 1. 10 rugged was substituted for rough-hewn (cf. Hamlet, V. 2. 11), 
while rough-hewn had been substituted for barbarous. 

Milton's Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, his first pamphlet on 
the subject and the immediate outcome of his unhappy marriage, 
appeared in 1643. The unusual views expressed in it gave great offence, 
to Presbyterians and Puritans in general no less than to Episcopalians. 
In reply to his critics Milton published several treatises enforcing his 
views; among them was the Tetrachordon (1645). Its name, from Gk. 
rerp&xopdos, 'four-stringed,' was 'explained on the title-page, which 
described the work as " Expositions upon the four chief places in 
Scripture which treat of marriage, or nullities in marriage." The texts 
expounded are Genesis i. 27, 28 (taken in conjunction with Genesis ii. 
18, 23, 24); Deuteronomy xxiv. 1, 2; Matthew v. 31, 32 (taken in 
conjunction with chapter xix. 3 — n); and 1 Corinthians vii. 10 — 16. 

In his Second Defence Milton says that one reason why he published 
these works advocating greater freedom of divorce was the divided state 
of the nation, it being often the case that husband and wife took 
different sides in the Revolution (P. W. I. 259). His own wife 
belonged to a Royalist family. 

3. walked the town, i.e. was circulated, the town = London. 

4. good intellects. It was ever Milton's claim that he appealed to 
"ft audience, though few" (P. L. VII. 31). 

7, 8. Mile-End Green ; "so called from its distance, roughly measured, 
from the central parts of London: it was a common in Milton's time, 
and the favourite terminus of a citizen's walk" — Masson. Now it is 
part of Whitechapel. 

8, 9. Milton chooses Scotch names in sarcastic allusion to the 
Presbyterians (mostly Scotch) who had condemned his opinions on 
divorce, and were evidently becoming almost as distasteful to him (see 
pp. 60 — 63) as the Episcopal followers of Laud had been. These 
particular Scotch names must often have been on the lips of Londoners 



42 SONNETS. 

at the time when this Sonnet was probably written — viz. the middle of 
1645 — as they were associated with the campaign of Montrose, who 
in the summer of- 1645 was at tne height of his success. 

" Among Montrose's most influential adherents in his enterprise 
there were several Gordons, of whom the most prominent were George, 
Lord Gordon, the eldest son of the Marquis of Huntly, and his next 
brother Charles Gordon, Viscount Aboyne " — Masson. 

According to Dr Masson, the three names in line 9 all belonged to the 
same person, viz. " Alexander Macdonald the younger," usually called 
"Young Colkitto" ( = ' left-handed'); one of the chief officers of 
Montrose. See the description in Scott's Legend of Montrose, xv. 

10. like, i.e. rugged like the names. Dr Bradshaw explains 
"mouths such as ours; our-like." sleek, smooth because familiar. 

11. Quintilian ; the celebrated Roman critic and rhetorician; lived 
A.D. 40 — 1 18. Milton refers to Quintilian's great work, the treatise on 
rhetoric (Be Institutione Oratoria Libri XI I.), in On Education, P. W. 
III. 468. 

12. 13. The sense is — Thy age did not hate learning worse than 
a toad, as our age does: then a Greek title like Tetrachordon would not 
have been so misunderstood or criticised as it is now. It was, I daresay, 
to show his contempt for his critics that he called his next pamphlet on 
divorce by a similar Greek name, viz. Colaslerion, = Gk. KoKaaT-qpiov, 
'an instrument of correction,' from koKol^lv, 'to chastise, correct.' Cf. 
too the title of the Areopagitica. 

12. Sir John Cheke ; lived 1514 — 1557; first holder of the Pro- 
fessorship of Greek at Cambridge established by Henry VIII. in 1540 
(but Erasmus had lectured there previously — cf. Gibbon's famous 
sarcasm) ; and afterwards tutor to Edward VI. 

Milton refers to Cheke not merely because he was a famous Greek 
scholar, but because (as Masson notes) he had been a member of the 
Commission appointed by Edward VI. in 1549 to formulate a code of 
ecclesiastical law in place of the old canon law. This Commission, of 
which Cranmer was the head, proposed certain relaxations of the 
existing Church-laws of divorce. Milton refers to it at the end of 
Tetrachordon and says that the carrying out of its proposals was only 
prevented by the untimely death of the king. He mentions the names 
of some of the Commissioners — among them " Sir John Cheeke, the 
king's tutor, a man at that time counted the learnedest of Englishmen, 
and for piety not inferior" (P. IV. III. 432). 

13. Hated not learning He has in mind the great expansion of 



NOTES. 43 

learning in the 16th century (especially seen in the revived study of 
Greek) which was part of the Renaissance. 

13. asp; see G. and cf. P. L. x. 524. 

14. taught' st Cambridge. Among Cheke's pupils at St John's 
College were William Cecil (afterwards Lord Burghley) and Roger 
Ascham, who speaks of Cheke with admiration several times in his 
Toxophilus and in The Schoolmaster (see Arber's ed., pp. 67, 154, with 
the editor's Introduction, pp. 6, 7). 

Cheke's tenure of the Professorship was notable for the controversy 
as to the pronunciation of Greek. The comparatively few Englishmen 
who then knew Greek pronounced it very much in the way that 
continental Scholars now pronounce it. Cheke introduced at Cambridge 
a pronunciation similar to that now current in England. Stephen 
Gardiner, the Chancellor of the University, endeavoured to stop the 
innovation. 

and King Edward. Cheke also acted sometimes as tutor to the 
Princess (afterwards Queen) Elizabeth. 



XII. 

A continuation of the subject. See first note on Sonnet XI. 

1. clogs, restraints; literally 'encumbrances' such as are put upon 
animals to prevent them straying ; an appropriate word therefore in 
view of the latter part of line 4. 

4. cuckoos ; see Sonnet I. 6. A term of contempt, as now, in 
2 Henry IV. II. 4. 3$ 7. M. first wrote buzzards ; an inferior kind of 
hawk — hence meant contemptuously. 

5 — 7. tiuinborn progeny; Apollo and Artemis ( = Diana in Roman 
mythology) ; god and goddess of the sun and moon respectively. 

Ovid tells the story that soon after their birth their mother the 
goddess Latona (or Leto), while wandering in Lycia, sought to drink 
from a pool, but was prevented by Lycian peasants ("hinds") who 
threatened and "railed" at her {minas..xonviciaque insuper addzinl) : 
whereupon she changed them all into frogs, which even sub aqua 
maledicere tentant. See the Meta?norphoses VI. 339 — 381. 

7. in Jee, in possession, * as their own'; see G. The line " inti- 
mates the good hopes which Milton had of himself, and his expectations 
of making a considerable figure in the world" — Newton. 

8. Alatthew vii. 6. In the same contemptuous spirit that inspired 



44 SONNETS. 

this verse he placed on the title-page of Tetrachordon these lines 

(299 — 302) from the Medea of his favourite Euripides: 
<TKaioL(Ti fiev yap Kaiva Trpoafapow <ro(f>a 
doi-eis dxpe?os kov <ro<pbs ire<pvK£va(. m 
tQjv d' ad Sokovvtwv eld hai tl ttolk'CKov 
Kpeiaauv pojuLiadels \virpbs kv 7r6\et <pavei. 

10. stilly always, ever. "The truth shall make you free," John 
viii. 32. 

11, 12. A favourite sentiment of Milton. Cf. his Tenure of Kings ', 
"indeed, none can love freedom heartily but good men; the rest love 
not freedom but licence," P. W. 11. 2. So in the Second Defence he 
says that only virtuous men can retain liberty after it is won, P. W, 
I. 295. Love of liberty was one of the ruling impulses of Milton's own 
life. Every one of his pamphlets was " written on the side of liberty" — 
Mark Paitison. (See notes on P. Z. II. 255 — 277, XI. 798, 799, 
Samson Agonistes y 268 — 271, Pitt Press editions.) 

14. For all, in spite of all. waste.. Joss, i.e. in the Civil War. 

XIII. 

Written, as we learn from the Cambridge MS., in February 1646. 
First printed 1648, being prefixed to a volume of " Choice Psalmes, 
put into Musick for three Voices: composed by Henry and William 
Lawes, Brothers, and Servants to his Majestie: 1648." Henry Lawes, 
1595 — 1662, a "Gentleman of the Chapel Royal" (i.e. one of the 
royal choir), and a member of the king's "private music" (orchestra), 
was the chief composer of his age. He was specially noted as a 
composer of incidental music for Masques and of songs. He wrote the 
music for Comus (and probably for Arcades), acted the part of "the 
Attendant Spirit " when the piece was first performed at Ludlow Castle 
in 1634, and was responsible for the publication of the first edition in 
1637. He seems to have been one of Milton's earliest and most 
intimate friends, thanks, no doubt, to their common love of music. 
At the time when this Sonnet was written their intimacy had 
evidently not been affected by political differences, though Lawes, like 
his brother (who fell fighting for the king at Chester in 1645), was an 
ardent Royalist, and the volume of Psalms to which Milton's poem was 
prefixed was dedicated to Charles. After 1648 we do not hear of 
Lawes in connection with Milton, so that the force of circumstances 
may have driven them apart. (See Introductions to Arcades and 



NOTES. 45 

Comus, Pitt Press edition ; also the Article on Lawes in Gi ove's 
Dictionary of Music.) 

i — 4. A very precise and musicianly description of Lawes's songs. 
He was content to make his music subordinate to the words, preserving 
their rhythm and accent with fidelity; so that the poetry, not the 
music (very often, a kind of recitative), was the chief element. This 
quality explains his great popularity with the poets of the period, many 
of whom, e.g. Herrick, Cartwright, and Waller, had songs set to music 
by him. See Appendix, III. (" Milton and Music"), pp. 71, 72. 

3. just note and accent, Cf. the preface on "The Verse" of 
Paradise Lost, where Milton says that one of the main elements of 
"true musical delight" in poetry is "fit quantity of syllables": by 
which he means, I think, that each stress or accent should fall naturally, 
i.e. that a syllable should not be forced by exigence of the metre to 
bear an accent alien to it. just, exact, proper (L,a.t. Justus). 

4. Midas, king of Phrygia. " Once when Pan and Apollo were 
engaged in a musical contest on the flute and lyre, Midas was chosen to 
decide between them. The king decided in favour of Pan, whereupon 
Apollo changed his ears into those of an ass" — Classical Dictionary. 

committing, matching, pairing; cf. Lat. commiitere, used of match- 
ing combatants. Milton wrote misjoining and then changed. 

5. 7. Newton quotes Horace's Odes: secernunt populo (1. 1. 32) — 
cf. "exempts thee from the throng" ( = gives you a place apart from 
ordinary musicians) ; and scrideris Variofortis et hostium \ victor (1. 6. 1). 

exempts ; a singular verb following two nouns which really form one 
idea is common in Elizabethan poetry; cf. Lycidas, 6, 7. 

6. Milton first wrote "And gives thee praise above the pipe of 
Pan," by which perhaps he intended to contrast Pan with Apollo (cf. 
" Phoebus, " 10), i.e. to continue the classical allusion suggested in 
line 4. 

wan; as we say, '■pale with envy.' 

8. smooth air. Cf. Comus, 86, where Milton speaks of the 
"smooth-dittied song" of Thyrsis — an obvious compliment to Lawes 
who took the part of Thyrsis (i.e. the "Attendant Spirit"). See also 
Comus, 494 — 496 (with note). 

9. lend; so the Cambridge MS.; the 1673 edition has send, which 
seems to be a misprint. Newton first adopted lend. 

10. Phoebus' quire, the poets of the time, quire, see G. 

11. hymn, i.e. sacred compositions such as the Choice Psalmes 
mentioned already, and the Coronation-anthem, "Zadock the Priest," 



46 SONNETS. 

written for the accession of Charles II. Lawes, however, was not one 
of our great Church-composers. 

story. A marginal note to the Sonnet as first published (1648) 
explains that this alludes to "The Story of Ariadne set by him [i.e. 
Lawes] to music." One of the airs for this Complaint of Ariadne (so 
the c Story' was entitled) gained such celebrity at the time that Milton's 
allusion was very apposite. The Complaint was by Cartwright, a 
minor poet and dramatist, for many of whose poems Lawes composed 
music. (Partly from Warton's note.) 

12 — 14. The allusion is to Dante's Purgatorio (wherein the poet 
imagines himself to visit Purgatory), II. 10. Cf. Warton's note: 
"Dante, on his arrival in Purgatory, sees a vessel approaching the 
shore, freighted with souls under the conduct of an angel, to be cleansed 
from their sins and made fit for Paradise. When they are disembarked 
the poet recognises in the crowd his old friend Casella, the musician. 
In the course of an affectionate dialogue, the poet requests a soothing 

air; and Casella sings Dante's second canzone [in the] Convito The 

Italian commentators say that Casella, Dante's friend, was a musician of 
distinguished excellence. He must have died a little before the year 
1300." 

The following is from Mr A. J. Butler's version of the Purgatorio ; 
Dante addresses Casella: " * If a new law takes not away from thee 
memory or use in the amorous chant which was wont to quiet all my 
wishes, let it please thee therewith to comfort somewhat my soul, which 
coming here with its body is so wearied.' Love, which discourses in my 
mind to me, then began he so sweetly, that the sweetness yet sounds 
within me. My Master [Vergil], and I, and that folk who were with 
him appeared so content, as though naught else touched the minds of 
any. We were all fixed and intent on his notes. " 

" A ballad set to music by Casella is said to be still extant in the 
Vatican Library." — A.J. Butler. 

12, 13. Originally these lines ran thus in the Cambridge MS. : 
"Fame, by the Tuscan's leave, shall set thee higher 
Than old Casell, whom Dante won to sing." 

Dante was a native of Florence, the capital of Tuscany. The 
influence of his works on Milton is seen clearly in Paradise Lost. In a 
letter from Florence, September 1638, Milton speaks of himself "retiring 
with avidity and delight to feast on Dante, Petrarch," P. W. in. 497. 

1 4. milder, i.e. less terrible than those of Hell, which Dante 
described in his earlier poem the Lnferno. 



NOTES. 47 



XIV. 



First printed 1673. The heading of this Sonnet in the Cambridge 
MS. (which shows that Milton made a number of changes in the 
original draft) fixes its date of composition, 1646. Three or four years 
later Milton lived near Charing Cross at the house of a Mr Thomson ; 
perhaps "Mrs Catherine Thomson" belonged to the same family — 
Newton. The Sonnet is entitled " An Elegy" in an early (1713) ed. 

3. earthy; so the edition of 1673; novv sometimes misprinted 
earthly. Cf. "this earthy grossness," On Time, 20. 

4. Cf. Samson Agonistes, 100, " To live a life half dead, a living 
death " ; Hall's Satires v. 2, " And each day dying lives, and living dies/ 

6. nor in the grave, i.e. were not buried with thee, as if done with 

7. golden rod ; suggested perhaps by Revelation xxi. 15. 

8. Cf. Paradise Lost, XI. 43, XII. 549 — 551. 

10. Cf. Comus, 782, "the sun-clad power of chastity," and On 
Time, 21, "attired with stars." The idea may be from Revelation xii. 1. 
purple; see G. 

14. "Thou shalt make them drink of the river of thy pleasures," 
Psalm xxxvi. 8. See also Revelation vii. 17, xxii. 1, to which there are 
similar allusions in Par. Lost, ill. 358, 359, v. 652, XI. 78, 79, Lycidas, 
174, Epitaphium Damonis, 206, 207. 

thy fill; now a somewhat vulgar expression, but not then; cf. 
Leviticus xxv. 19, Detiteronomy xxiii. 24. So in Par. Lost, v. 504. 

immortal; cf. " living fountains," " water of life " in Revelation. 



XV. 

Sonnets xv, xvi, xvn. A group of kindred, political Sonnets. 

This and the following Sonnet were not printed in the edition of 
1673, on acount of their political tone. They first appeared, with 
numerous imperfections of text, in the Life of Milton by his nephew 
Phillips, 1694. Fortunately both are in the Cambridge MS., the text 
of which is followed by modern editors. Bishop Newton first tran- 
scribed them from the MS. 

The Sonnet was written in 1648, between June 13, when Fairfax 
laid siege to Colchester, and August 17, when Cromwell defeated the 
Scottish army; see note on line 8. In 1648 the Royalists made a fresh 



48 SONNETS. 

and final effort. There were "new rebellions" (line 6) in the king's 
behalf in Kent, the west of England and Wales, and Scotland sent an 
army to his aid. Defeated by Fairfax at Maidstone, the surviving 
leaders of the Royalists in the east retreated to Colchester, which was 
besieged from June 13 to August 27. This poem therefore was 
prompted by, and surely breathes the spirit of, a national crisis. 

It is addressed to the Commander-in-chief of the Parliamentary forces 
— Thomas, the third Lord Fairfax; born 1612, died 1671. Milton and 
he were contemporaries at Cambridge, Fairfax being of St John's Coll. 

2. envy, slighting, depreciatory remarks ; rather than envious in 
modern sense. 

4. that daunt remotest kings, i. e. with the fear that their monarchies 
like the English would be overthrown. 

5. virtue — valour (which Phillips's edition reads); for this Latin 
use {^virtus) see G. and cf. Par. Lost, I. 319, 320 : 

"After the toil of battle to repose 
Your wearied virtue." 
Fairfax was distinguished by extreme personal courage ; several of 
his contemporaries make mention of it; Cromwell [Letter xxix) 
specially commended his bravery at the battle of Naseby. Compare 
too Milton's words in the Second Defence, where, enumerating the great 
leaders on the side of the Commonwealth, he says: "Nor would it be 
right to pass over the name of Fairfax, who united the utmost fortitude 
with the utmost courage; and the spotless innocence of whose life 
seemed to point him out as the peculiar favourite of Heaven," P. W. 1. 
286, 287. 

7. Cf. 1 Henry IV., v. 4. 25, "Another king! they grow like 
Hydra's heads," and Henry V., I. 1. 35, " Hydra-headed wilfulness." 
The allusion is to the Lernean Hydra, a nine-headed serpent or 
* dragon.' To slay it was one of the 'labours' of Hercules. When 
he cut off one head two fresh ones came in its stead. Similarly, Milton 
implies that as one Royalist uprising in one part of England was 
crushed by the Parliament, another began elsewhere. 

8. league, i.e. the Solemn League and Covenant between the 
Parliament and the Scots, 1643. At the time when these lines were 
written the Scottish army under Hamilton was invading England in 
support of Charles: hence Milton says "false North," "broken league." 

serpent wings. "Euripides, Milton's favourite, is the only writer of 
antiquity that has given wings to the monster Hydra" — Warton. Cf. 
the description of the Hydra in the Ion 195, where, however, instead of 
irTavbv, 'winged,' some editors would read iravov, 'torch.' Several of 



NOTES. 49 

the offspring of the half-serpent Echidna, mother of the Hydra, were 
winged monsters, e.g. the Sphinx and the Gorgon, so that the attribu- 
tion of wings to the Hydra is not so strange. Moreover winged 
4 dragons' are often mentioned in ancient writers; see Par. Lost, VII. 
484, note. 

imp, repair; see G. their, i.e. of the "new rebellions " (6). 

12 — 14. More than once in his prose-works Milton makes it plain 
that the Civil troubles led to much jobbery and malpractice, the baser 
Parliamentarians using their power as a means of self-aggrandizement, 
enrichment, and personal revenge. See Second Defence, P. W. I. 297. 
It was his boast that he himself had been ruined rather than enriched ; 
see Samson Agonistes, 697, note, fraud, general dishonesty. 



XVI. 

First printed (like the preceding Sonnet) by Phillips in 1694; in a 
form differing considerably, and for the worse, from the version in the 
Cambridge MS., which is now followed by all editors. Written pro- 
bably in May 1652. 

The Sonnet has an obvious affinity to that addressed to Fairfax, 
being equally the outcome of a crisis (as Milton thought) in the nation's 
history. It is not, Masson remarks, a general expression of Milton's 
admiration for Cromwell, but a special appeal invoked by certain 
circumstances. That appeal comes in the last four lines and is the 
climax to which the preceding ten lines have led up; its nature is 
indicated by the title of the Sonnet. 

" The co?nmittee for the propagation of the gospel was a committee of 
the Rump Parliament. It consisted of fourteen members, and had 
general administrative duties in church affairs, specially that of supply- 
ing spiritual destitution in the parishes. The proposals of certain 
ministers were fifteen proposals offered to the committee by John 
Owen, and other well-known ministers, in which they asked that the 
preachers should receive a public maintenance." — Mark Paliison. 

1. Cromwell. The best commentary on the historical aspect of the 
earlier part of the poem, and on Milton's feelings towards Cromwell, is 
the long passage in the Second Defence (1654) in which the character and 
services of the Protector are reviewed eulogistically, and his responsi- 
bilities to the nation discussed, P. W. I. 2S2 — 29L Whether Milton 

M. S. 4 



50 SONNETS. 

was brought into personal contact with Cromwell has been doubted. 

1, 2. cloud... of war ; Vergil's phrase tiubes belli — sEneid, x. 809. 
See also Paradise Lost, VI. 539. 

2. detractions; contrasted with " truth " (4); he refers, perhaps, 
mainly to the Presbyterians whose bitterness against Cromwell he speaks 
of in the Second Defence (1654) ?• ^ L 2 %3' 

5. on the neck ; cf. Joshua x. 24, " Come near, put your feet upon 
the necks of these kings " : an obvious symbol of triumphing over. 

6. reared, raised, set up. pursued, followed up steadily. 

7 — 9. The victorious battles of Cromwell alluded to are : Preston, 
August 17, 1648, when he defeated the Scots under Hamilton ; Dunbar, 
Sept. 3, 1650, a complete rout of the Scottish army under David Leslie ; 
and Worcester, Sept. 3, 165 1. Cromwell died on Sept. 3rd (1658), and 
Marvell introduces the coincidence of date very effectively in his poem 
(141 — 148) on the death of the Protector. 

7. Darwen ; a stream which runs into the Ribble near Preston. 

9. Elizabethan poets were fond of the phrase " wreath of victory"; 
cf. Julius Ccesar, v. 3. 82, "Put on my brows this wreath of victory." 
Cromwell himself called the victory at Worcester a " crowning mercy," 
and M. may have had the description in mind. 

10, 11. One of the not many familiar quotations from Milton. 

11 — 14. The practical object of the proposals against which Milton 
protests was to establish a Presbyterian Church supported by the State. 
Milton's objection was twofold : (1) that there ought to be no union of 
secular and spiritual matters — cf. the antithesis in line 12 between 
"soul" and "secular"; (2) that ministers of religion, if remunerated 
at all, should receive only the voluntary offerings of their congregations. 
This objection to a paid ("hireling") ministry occurs constantly in his 
works; see Lycidas, 118 — 131, Par. Lost, IV. 192, 193, XII. 508 — 511, 
with notes. In Christian Doctrine, I. xxxi, he deals with the subject 
at some length, arguing that ministers might support themselves "by the 
exercise of some calling, by some industry," and so not need remuneration 
for their ministry ; or failing this, that "they should look for the neces- 
sary support of life, not from the edicts of the civil power, but from 
the spontaneous goodwill and liberality of the church in requital of 
their voluntary service." He was especially bitter against the Presby- 
terian ministers, denouncing them for greed in his last pamphlet on 
religion, The Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings out of the Church 
(1659), and m other treatises. See P. W. II. 36, III. 18, 19, IV. 
460; and Appendix, IV., v., pp. 72 — 74. 



NOTES. 5 1 

13, 14. The only rhymed couplet at the end of one of Milton's 
Sonnets, free; see "On The New Forcers of Conscience," 6. 

14. wolves. See the parable of the ' Good Shepherd,' John x. 12 ; 
and Acts xx. 29. With Milton it is a favourite metaphor for avaricious 
ministers of religion; cf. Par. Lost, XII. 508 — 511 : 

" Wolves shall succeed for teachers, grievous wolves, 

Who all the sacred mysteries of Heaven 
' To their own vile advantages shall turn 
Of lucre and ambition." 
See P. W. 11. 36, iv, 460. 

maw, stomach, Germ, magen; a vulgar word used more of animals 
than of men. Perhaps M. had in mind Philippians iii. 19: "Whose 
end is destruction, whose God is their belly." 



XVII. 

First printed in the Life and Death of Sir H. Vane by George Sikes, 
1662, with the date of its composition, July 3, 1652. This date, coupled 
with the fact that Vane was the leader of the Independents, and so 
opposed to the Presbyterians, links the Sonnet with that to Cromwell. 
It is among the Cambridge MSS. 

" Sir Henry Vane The Younger"; born 16 12; Governor of Massa- 
chusetts, 1636, 1637; afterwards one of the most prominent members of 
the Long Parliament and chief opponents of the king; a leading 
Independent and Republican; excluded at the Restoration from the 
Act of Indemnity and, after an unjust trial, executed on June 14, 1662. 
Milton alludes to his fate in Samson Agonistes, 692 — 696. Called " the 
Younger" to distinguish him from his father, also Sir Henry Vane. 

1, 2. young, i.e. then about forty. thanwho?n. Dr Bradshaw notes 
that M. has this phrase in P. L. I. 490, II. 299, v. 805. After the 
relative, but only then, it is customary to use the objective case {whom) 
with than. Strictly the use, which makes than a preposition, is not 
defensible. See West's Elements of English Gram??iar, p. 257. 

3. gowns, not arms. The common antithesis between toga and 
artna (i.e. the civil power and the military), as in cedant ar?na toga. 

4. The fierce Epirot ; Pyrrhus, king of Epirus ; born 318 B.C., died 
272. His first invasion of Italy was in 280 — 278, his second in 276 — 
275. Ep'rot=7j7r€Lpu)TTjs, a native of ijireipos, 'mainland,' the name of 
a country (modern Albania) on the north-west coast of Greece. 

4~2 



52 SONNETS. 

the African bold; Hannibal, the great Carthaginian general (see 
P. R. hi. 35) ; born 247 B.C., died about 183. He invaded Italy 218, 
and was not driven out till 203. Historically it is true that the failure 
of Pyrrhus and Hannibal was due as much to the administration and 
diplomacy ("gowns") of the Roman Senate as to the army ("arms"). 

6. i.e. the perplexing policy of deceptive states. Probably he 
means the Dutch, against whom war was declared during that very 
month (July), spelled, understood, read aright. 

7 — 9. Vane had been appointed treasurer of the navy by Charles in 
1637, and by the Parliament on the outbreak of the Civil War; and in 
1642 was a member of the Parliament's committee of defence. A few 
months after this Sonnet was written he was made chairman of the 
commission for managing the affairs of the army and navy, and it was 
mainly through his energy and skill in organising that the fleet with 
which Blake defeated Van Tromp, in 1653, was fitted out. In 1659 
Vane was again the chairman of a similar commission. Plis administra- 
tive capacity in such matters was evidently of a high order — as Milton 
implies. 

7, 8. The saying that money is ' the sinews of war,' i.e. the main 
strength of, was proverbial in classical writers; Cicero has it, Philippics 
5. 2 (nervi belli pecunia). For nerve (Lat. nervus, * sinew'), used in 
this metaphorical sense =' strength, chief support of,' cf. Troilus and 
Cressida, I. 3. 55, "Thou great commander, nerve and bone of Greece." 

10, 11. We have noticed already Milton's feeling with regard to 
the severance of the spiritual and secular pow r ers; see Sonnet XVI. 
1 1 — 14, note. He wrote a tract Of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes. 

thou hast learned ; by practical experience, as Governor of Massa- 
chusetts : a post in which Vane had shown great capacity. 

1 2. The bounds of either sword, the limits of each power ; for the 
sword as a symbol of authority, cf. ' the sword of justice.' See also 
On the New Forcers of Conscience, 5. 

14. eldest son^ i.e. chief supporter. 



XVIII. 

This Sonnet was evoked by the sufferings in 1655 of the Waldenses 
or Vaudois, a sect which appears to have originated about the close of 
the 1 2th century. In the first instance, they were the followers of a 
Lyons merchant Peter Waldo (cf. their original name Waldenses), 



NOTES. 53 

whose teaching anticipated the Protestant principles of the Reformation. 
As, with increasing numbers, the sect became more important, they 
were persecuted, and eventually forced to leave the south of France and 
take refuge in certain valleys of Piedmont subject to the Duke of Savoy. 
Susa, to the south-east of Mont Cenis, became (and remains) their 
chief centre. Thenceforth they were commonly called Vaudois, after 
the Canton Vaud. 

In January 1655 the Duke of Savoy issued an edict that the Vaudois 
must, within a few days, either join the Church of Rome or quit his 
territory — under pain of death if they resisted. Their remonstrances 
were in vain, and in April an army was sent to enforce the edict. 

A general massacre took place among those who had refused to 
leave, or to profess the Roman Catholic faith ; some escaped, however, 
into the mountains and appealed to England for help. The news of 
the event aroused great sympathy in this country, and Cromwell ordered 
a national fast and subscription (which amounted to ,£40,000) for the 
benefit of the survivors; he also sent an envoy bearing a letter of 
remonstrance to the Duke, and urged the Protestant powers of Europe 
to make similar intercession. His efforts proved successful, the survivors 
being permitted to return to their homes and retain their forms of 
worship. As Latin Secretary to the Committee of Foreign Affairs (see 
p. xvii), Milton composed all the despatches sent by Cromwell in 
connection with the event. They are printed among his " Letters of 
State." This Sonnet, of course, is far stronger in expression of feeling. 

The following extract is from the despatch to Charles X. of Sweden 
and is typical of the Letters : " We make no question but that the fame 
of that most rigid edict has reached your dominions, whereby the duke 
ofJSavoy has totally ruined his protestant subjects inhabiting the Alpine 
valleys... so that many being killed, the rest stripped and exposed to 
most certain destruction are now forced to wander over desert mountains, 
and through perpetual winter, together with their wives and children, 
half dead with cold and hunger... Therefore we make it our chief 
request that you would solicit the duke of Savoy by letters, and, by 
interposing your intermediating authority, endeavour to avert the horrid 
cruelty of this edict" — P. W. 11. 252, 253. 

3. who kept thy truth. Cf. Milton's tract The Likeliest Means to 
RetJiove Hirelings out of the Church , 1659: "those ancientest reformed 
churches of the Waldenses — if they rather continued not pure since the 
apostles"; and again, "the Waldenses, our first reformers" (A W. III. 
pp. 16, 32). So in the "Letters of State" he speaks of them as 



54 SONNETS. 

" ancient professors of the orthodox faith," and u for many years 
remarkably famous for embracing the purity of religion" — P. W. II. 
254, 259. 

At that time the sect of Vaudois was supposed to be of great 
antiquity, reaching back almost to the Apostolic era. But, as stated 
above, their origin cannot historically be placed earlier than the end of 
the 12th century. Their worship was of a most simple character. 

4. A reference, characteristic of Milton, to the pre- Reformation 
times in England, and to what he considered idolatrous practices in 
worship. (See Christian Doctrine II. V.) 

5. in thy Book. See Revelation xx. 12. 

7, 8. Sir Samuel Morland, Cromwell's envoy to the Duke of Savoy, 
published in 1658 a history of the Vaudois and an account of the 
massacre. He relates (and gives an illustration of) an incident such as 
these lines describe: "A mother was hurled down a mighty rock, with 
a little infant in her arms; and three days after was found dead with 
the little child alive, but fast clasped between the arms of the dead 
mother which were cold and stiffe, insomuch that those who found them 
had much ado to get the young childe out." Morland's history of the 
sect was taken mainly from MSS. with which leading members of the 
Vaudois had furnished him at Turin. He afterwards gave them to the 
University of Cambridge (having himself been at Magdalene College), 
and they are now in the University Library. Unfortunately they were 
for the most part forgeries, designed to prove the tradition of the 
antiquity of the sect. See the National Dictionary of Biography. 

In England many prints of these scenes of massacre were published, 
and " operated like Fox's * Book of Martyrs' " in exciting horror of the 
Church of Rome. — Warton. 

9. redoubled, re-echoed. 

10. He is thinking of Tertullian's famous saying, "The blood of 
martyrs is the seed of the church." 

11. the Italian fields. Cf. P. L. I. 520, M Fled over Adria to the 
Hesperian fields," i.e. Italy; and Comus, 60, "Roving the Celtic and 
Iberian fields," i.e. France and Spain. 

12. 13. The triple tyrant, the Pope ; an allusion to the Papal tiara 
surrounded with three crowns, who, those who. 

14. The Puritans interpreted the Babylon, "that great city," of 
the Book of Revelation to be the Church of Rome. By " Babylonian 
woe" Milton means, I suppose, the destruction foretold in Rev. xviii.; 
but some interpret it " Antichrist." 



NOTES. 55 

XIX. 

Milton "speaks with great modesty of himself, as if he had not 
five, or two, but only one talent." — Newton. 

2. Ere half my days ; not to be taken quite literally ; he was in his 
44th year when total blindness came upon him ; see Life, p. xviii. 

dark, i.e. to him in his affliction. Cf. P. L. vn. 27, and Samson 
Agoniste^ 80, 81, where the poet is thinking of his own state. 

wide; (he epithet is beautifully suggestive of a blind man's feeling of 
helplessneis, and the effect is increased by the alliteration. 

3. Anallusion to the parable of the talents, Matthew xxv. 14 — 30. 
that one'alent ; his poetic faculty; see Sonnet II., last note. 

7. He sterns to have John ix. 4 in mind. No " day-ldhowx " can 
be expected cf him because he only knows an unbroken "night, when 
no man can w>rk." 

8. fondly , foolishly ; see G. prevent, check, forestall (prcevenire). 

12. thousaids, i.e. of angelic beings. In Christian Doctrine, 1. ix. 
Milton discusser " The Special Government of Angels" in relation to 
this world, and their execution of the commands of the Almighty. 
Among texts whch he quotes are Zechariah i. 10, iv. 10, Rev. v. 6. 

13. post, sped, hasten; a common Shakespearian word; cf. Julius 
Ccesar, in. 1. 28, "Post back with speed, and tell him what hath 
chanced." 

14. They also, hose other angels too — in contrast to the " thousands" 
just mentioned. 

stand; cf. Lukti. 19, "I am Gabriel, that stand in the presence of 
God" ; and Daniewii. 10. 

This Sonnet is ibstrated by Appendix, I. and v., pp. 67, 68, 75, 76. 



XX. 

Written probably bout 1656. 

The friend addressi was a son of the Puritan statesman and writer 
Henry Lawrence (160—1664), a kinsman of Cromwell and "Lord 
President of the Counil" of State for several years (1653 — 1659). As 
secretary, Milton mus have been brought into contact with Henry 
Lawrence — perhaps knw him at Cambridge, where he was a member 
of the Puritan College Emmanuel, 1622 — 1627. There is a eulogistic 
allusion to him in the Second Defence (P. W. I. 293). Phillips in h\s 



56 SONNETS. 

Life specially mentions one of Lawrence's sons— nc doubt, the one 
addressed in these lines— as a frequent visitor at Milton's house. If it 
was the eldest son, the Sonnet gains a pathetic interest from the fact 
that he died so soon after (in 1657). 

" The two sonnets [xx, xxi] are the best, perhaps the only successful, 
experiments in the lighter style, which Milton has made... Tie cast of 
these sonnets as notes of invitation is suggested by Horace, n. Carm. 
11, 1, ' Quid bellicosus Cantaber' &c." — Mark Pattison. 

1. An imitation of Horace's line matre puichra filia mlchrior — 
Odes I. 16. 1. 

4, 5. waste, spend; see G. what; the object of gaining 'Making 
the best of the dull, cold season.' 

6. Favonius, the south-west wind ; the proverbial harbinger of 
spring, reinspire, breathe upon once more. 

7. in fresh attire ; cf. " the well-attired woodbine, "Lycidas, 146. 

8. Matthew vi. 28. The metaphor introduced in cfthe... attire. 

9. 10. Milton's biographers speak of him as very tmperate in diet 
and abstemious. His feelings on the point are expressed in the sixth of 
his Latin Elegies (55 — 78). 

10. Attic, simple yet refined; commonly appliec to literary style, 
as in the phrase "Attic wit" (or "salt" = Lat. Allium sal), 'refined, 
delicate wit.' See G. 

n, 12. On Milton's love of music see pp. x, *ii, 71, 72, and the 
Notes on the Sonnet to Lawes. Describing the pet's daily habits in 
his latter years Johnson says that, after studying til twelve o'clock, he 
" then took some exercise for an hour; then dined,then played on the 
organ, and sang, or heard another sing," and then tudied again till six 
[Life of Milton). 

Next to the organ, the lute seems to have beer his favourite instru- 
ment; they are the two instruments specially metioned in the section 
on music in his treatise On Education (P. IV. 11 14 76). 

A friend whose playing on the lute had den given him much 
pleasure was Henry Lawes ; see p. 44. 

12. Cf. L 'Allegro, 135 — 150. Tuscan; in thj^eneral sense 'Italian.' 
Cf. Tennyson, In Memoria?n, lxxxix., " the "hscan poets." On his 
foreign tour (1638, 1639) Milton purchased a quntity of Italian music 
and shipped it home from Venice. 

13, 14. 'He who can appreciate such pjasures and yet refrain 
from treating himself to them often, is wise: hey should be enjoyed 
sparingly.' oft; emphatic; contrast "sometims" in 3. 



NOTES. 57 

13. spare to, abstain from ; cf. the use in Latin of an infinitive after 
parcere. Some interpret (wrongly?) 'spare the time to interpose.* 

14. interpose; suggests the idea of interrupting serious pursuits. 
not unwise ; an example of meiosis, a figure of speech which Milton 

uses often in P. L.\ cf. III. 32. So in Sonnet xxi. "no mean" = 
great (line 2). 

XXI. 

Written perhaps about 1657; similar in sentiment (5, 6, II — 14) 
and familiar style to Sonnet XX. 

Cyriac Skinner, a lawyer and member of Harrington's political club 
called " the Rota," had been one of Milton's pupils. He was a special 
favourite of the poet, lived near him for some years, and was among the 
frequent visitors who read to him and acted as occasional amanuenses. 

1. grandsire; Sir Edward Coke, 1552 — 1634; the celebrated judge 
and law-writer. His second daughter married William Skinner, father 
of Cyriac. 

2. Themis ; the goddess of law and justice. 

3. in his volumes. Coke's chief legal works were the Reports and 
Institutes of the Lazus of England. 

4. bar, i.e. of the courts of law; cf. 'barrister.' wrench, twist, 
distort ; see G. 

5. drench, steep; akin to drown, which is more commonly used in 
this metaphorical way; cf. The Passionate Pilgrim, 113, "And I in 
deep delight am chiefly drowned." 

6. after, afterwards. 

7. 8. i.e. dismiss from your thoughts both mathematical and 
scientific studies, and foreign politics. 

Mr Mark Pattison reminds us that about the middle of the 17th 
century there was a great development in England of the study of 
science and natural philosophy: a movement marked by the foundation 
of the Royal Society in 1660. See Evelyn's Diary often; and Pepys. 

8. Milton was thinking of Horace's stanza (Odes, II. 11. 1 — 4) : 

Quid bellicosus Cantaber et Scythes, 
Hirpine Quinti, cogitet Hadria 
Divisus objecto, remit tas 
Quaerere. 
what the Swede intends; dependent on let rest—'&o not trouble 
about.' 



58 SONNETS. 

intends ; so the Cambridge MS.; the 1673 edition has intend. 

Charles X. of Sweden was then at war with Poland and Russia. 
Among the 6 Letters of State ' written by Milton at this period there are 
several to Charles. 

A treaty between England and France was made in 1655 and a 
defensive alliance in 1657. In the Netherlands the armies of Louis XIV. 
were vanquishing the Spanish. Altogether, France and French politics 
must have been a good deal in people's thoughts. 

9. betimes, early, in good time. Originally by time* 

11. ' We are not to be always occupied with serious matters.' 

XXII. 

The time- reference in the first line indicates that the Sonnet was 
written in 1655, the date of Milton's complete loss of sight being 165a. 
The poem was first printed by Phillips in 1694 ; the tone of lines 9 — 15 
prevented its being published in the 1673 edition. 

i, 2. Similarly in the Second Defence he says of his eyes, "so little 
do they betray any external appearance of injury, that they are as 
unclouded and bright as the eyes of those who see most distinctly" 
(P. W. I. 235). 

Probably the disease from which he suffered was amaurosis or 
disease of the optic nerve, since that commonly makes no external 
change in the eye. Cf. the passage on his blindness in P. L. III. 22 — 26: 

"thou (Light) 
Revisit'st not these eyes, that roll in vain 
To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn; 
So thick a drop serene hath quenched their orbs, 
Or dim suffusion veiled." 
The expression " drop serene " is a literal rendering of gutta serena, 
the technical Latin term for "complete amaurosis," i.e. amaurosis in 
its worst form. On Milton's blindness, see also pp. 75, 76. 

1. this three years'" day; cf. 2 Henry VI. II. 1. 2, "I saw not 
better sport these seven years' day." 

4. orbs, eye-balls; cf. oculorum orbes in ALneid, xil. 670; and 
6/jl/j.oltoju kvk\ol, e.g. in the Antigone, 974. 

7. bate, abate; an ' aphetised,' i.e. shortened, form. 

8. bear up; a nautical metaphor; * to sail, take one's course, 
towards.' Cf. Othello, I. 3. 8, "A Turkish fleet, and bearing up to 
Cyprus"; so in The Tempest, ill. 2. 3, "bear up and board' em." 

10. conscience, consciousness; see G. 



NOTES. 59 

n. In liberty* s defence, i.e. by writing his first Defence of the English 
People (Pro populo Anglicano defensio), 1651. See Life, p. xviii. 

In the exordium (P. JV. I. 216 — 222) of the Second Defence, 1654, 
Milton speaks in most exalted terms of the services which he supposed 
himself to have rendered by the first Defence to the cause of liberty, 
and of the impression which he had created abroad. His words, he 
thinks, were addressed 'not merely to his own countrymen but to "the 
whole collective body of people, cities, states, and councils of the wise 
and eminent, through the wide expanse of anxious and listening Europe" 
(p. 219). 

12. talks; so the Cambridge MS.; changed by Phillips to rings, 
merely in imitation, I suppose, of the first line of Sonnet XV (also one 
of the Sonnets first published in Phillips's Life). Almost all editors 
adopt rings as a more poetical word than talks ; yet in the numerous 
other instances in which the text of the four Sonnets first printed by 
Phillips differs from the Cambridge MS., the latter, which gives us the 
poems as written or dictated by Milton, is now universally followed. To 
depart from this principle in a single case (which moreover is so readily 
explained by the theory of imitation) seems to me very arbitrary. 

13. mask; we use 'masquerade' in this metaphorical sense. 

XXIII. 

Perhaps Raleigh's Sonnet "A Vision upon The Faerie Queene" 
suggested to M. "the idea of a Sonnet in the form of a Vision." 

Milton's first wife died in 1652. In November 1656 he married 
Catherine Woodcock, who died fifteen months later (February, 1658)^1 
childbirth. Of her we know nothing more than this Sonnet tells us. 
Probably it was written in 1658. Its pathos is heightened by the fact 
that Milton had never seen his wife. 

1 — 4. The story how Alcestis, wife of Admetus, king of Pherae in 
Thessaly, died in place of her husband but was brought back from the 
lower world by Hercules ("Jove's great son "), is told in the Alcestis of 
Milton's favourite Euripides ; cf. Browning, Balaustiori's Adventure. 

3. Admetus, thanking Hercules, addresses him, (S rod fieylcrToo 
Ti-qvbs exryevks t£kvov — Alcestis, 11 36. 

5, 6. Alluding to the ceremonies for purification after childbirth 
enjoined by the Mosaic Law — Leviticus xii. as whom, as one whom. 

10. Her face was veiled ; as was the face of Alcestis at first when 
Hercules brought her back into her husband's presence. 

14. Cf. P. L. VIII. 478 — 480. night, i.e. of blindness. 



60 SONNETS. 



On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long 
Parliament. 

In the 1673 edition (where it is first printed) this poem is not 
placed among the Sonnets. Strictly, it belongs to the genus Sonnet; 
written in Italian, it would certainly be treated as a Sonnet, for the 
type (Sonetto Codato, " Tailed Sonnet") was recognised by Italian poets 
and critics. But the poem is irregular according to the normal prin- 
ciples of the structure of the English Sonnet, and among Milton's 
editors there has always been difference of opinion how to class it. 
Some place it — unnumbered — at the end of the Sonnets, and this seems 
to me the best plan. It must however be read in close connection 
with Sonnets XI, XII, since their under-current of hostility to Presby- 
terianism here finds full vent: Milton speaks as an Independent, and 
pleads for liberty of conscience. Date of composition about 1646-47. 

Regarding the piece as a Sonnet "strictly conformed to the Italian 
model," Mr Mark Pattison says : " It is of the form called 'colla coda,' 
a form which seems to have been introduced as early as the fifteenth 
century, and was much used by a Rabelaisian Florentine satirist who 
went by the name of Burchiello. From him was derived the denomi- 
nation Burchielleschi, applied to a species of homely and familiar verse. 
This form went out of fashion during the sixteenth centuiy, but was 
revived at the beginning of the seventeenth, and Milton may have met 
with sonnets of this burlesque form in circulation at Florence. At any 
rate, in this sonnet alone we have sufficient evidence that Milton went 
to Italian models for his sonnets." No doubt, Milton selected this class 
of composition because of its traditional use for colloquial satire. The 
phrase " forcers of conscience " occurs in Of Civil Power (11. 532). 

1. The resolution of the Commons to abolish Episcopacy, adopted 
in September 1642, was formally passed in October 1646. The words 
" thrown off your Prelate Lord" may have special reference to this 
formal abolition of Prelacy, or merely allude in general terms to the 
efforts of the Commons to crush the Episcopal system of the Church 
and substitute Presbyterianism. 

1. renounced his Liturgy. The public and even private use of the 
Book of Common Prayer was forbidden by the Commons in 1645. 

3. "The parochial endowments were not confiscated, and as many 
of the clergy left their livings rather than conform to the Presbyterian 



NOTES. 6 1 

government and ritual, there was much preferment vacant, and conse- 
quently much scramble for it" — Mark Pattison. Moreover under the 
new system there was just as much pluralism as under the old, i.e. 
holding of more than one post (for the sake of salary) by the same 
minister. 

5. for this, for this purpose, i.e. to be pluralists. adjure the civil 
sword, i.e. call in the power of the State to enforce submission to 
Presbyterianism. This the Presbyterians were very ready to do. In 
fact, Milton found that as regards toleration and liberty of opinion in 
religious questions nothing had been gained by the overthrow of the 
Laudian system; cf. line 20, note. 

6, 7. consciences... free; cf. Sonnet xvi. 13. ride, override, oppress. 
classic hierarchy. Under the Presbyterian organization the classis 

is the synod or council composed of all the ministers and lay- elders of a 
town or district. It has certain powers over the ministry and religious 
affairs of the district which it represents. When Presbyterianism was 
established in England, the country was divided into provinces instead 
of dioceses, and each province was subdivided according to classes. 
The province, i.e. diocese, of London had twelve of these classes or 
synods. Cf. The Hind aitd the Panther, I. 188, 189. 

In his pamphlet Observations on the Articles (1649) °f tne P eace 
made with Ireland Milton attacks the Presbytery of Belfast, and 
speaking of the civil powers it claimed, says, "we are sure that pulpits 
and church-assemblies, whether classical or provincial, never were 
intended or allowed by wise magistrates to advance such purposes " — 
P. W. II. 190. He sneers at their " classic priestship," and their 
"parochial, classical, and provincial hierarchies" (pp. 192, 194). 

8. A. S. y Adam Steuart, a Scotsman resident in London, who 
published several pamphlets upholding strict Presbyterianism against 
the views of the Independents who advocated toleration. His works 
appeared under the initials "A. S."; hence the contemptuous curtness 
of the allusion to him here. 

Samuel Rutherford was one of the four Scots ministers who sat in 
the Westminster Assembly of Divines and drew up a Presbyterian 
system for England. He too belonged to the strict set of Presbyterians, 
and opposed the Independents. He was for some time professor at 
St Andrew's and a prolific writer of theological pamphlets and tracts. 

12. Thomas Edwards, in a work entitled Gangrcena: or a Catalogue 
of many of the Errors, Heresies, Blasphemies, and pernicious Practices 
of the Sectaries of this Time (1645 — 6) censuied Milton for the opinions 



62 SONNETS. 

expressed in his pamphlets on divorce. Edwards was a clergyman of 
extreme Protestant views. As one of the University preachers at 
Cambridge he earned the title "young Luther." Afterwards he 
supported Presbyterianism strongly and attacked the Independents. 
His allusion to Milton occurs on p. 29, part I., of the Gangrcena — a 
book which created immense sensation at the time. 

What-cTye-call; a contemptuous description like "mere A. S." in 
line 8. Dr Masson takes the reference to be to the Rev. Robert Baillie, 
professor at Glasgow University, and, like Rutherford, one of the 
Scottish members of the Westminster Assembly. In his Dissuasive 
from the Errors of the Time (1645), a pamphlet directed specially 
against the Independents, he condemned Milton's views of divorce in 
much the same style as Edwards in his Gangrcena. Warton thought 
that Alexander Henderson (who died August 1646) might be meant, or 
George Gillespie. They were the two other members who represented 
Scottish Presbyterianism at Westminster, In any case the line, like 
Sonnet xi, shows Milton's jealous dislike of these Presbyterians from 
the north. 

14. He means that much intriguing went on in the Westminster 
Assembly of Divines, and that the Assembly was unfairly constituted 
("packed"), the Presbyterians being in an overwhelming majority, to 
the practical exclusion of the Independents (who had only five repre- 
sentatives) anc 1 other parties, packing ; cf. the phrase 'to pack a jury.' 

Trent, i.e. the Council of Trent (1545 — J 5^3)> at which the repre- 
sentatives of the Roman Catholic Church greatly outnumbered its 
opponents. 

15. "More than once the Parliament had rebuked the over- 
officiousness of the Westminster Assembly, and reminded it that it was 
not an authority in the realm.... Especially in April 1646 there had been 
a case of this kind, when the Commons voted certain proceedings of the 
Assembly to be a breach of privilege, and intimated to the Divines that 
a repetition of such proceedings might subject them individually to 
heavy punishment " — Masson. Milton evidently hoped that the Com- 
mons would at last assert themselves and read the Assembly a sharp 
lesson. 

17. Clip your phylacteries, curtail your hypocritical pretensions and 
insolence, phylacteries ; see G. baulk, spare, not touch; see G. 

In its original form the line ran, "Crop ye as close as marginal P — 's 
eares": an allusion "to the celebrated William Prynne, the Lincoln's 
Inn Lawyer, who had been twice pilloried and had his nose slit and his 



NOTES. 63 

ears cut off for anti-Prelatic pamphlets by sentence of the S tar-Chamber. 
... Since his release from prison at the opening of the Long Parliament 
in 1640, Prynne had been a conspicuous Presbyterian, enforcing his 
views in tract after tract of a dry and learned kind, always with 
references to his authorities running down the margins of the pages. 
Prynne's want of ears and the laboured margins of his pamphlets were 
subjects of popular jest; but Milton had a special grudge against him 
on account of a reference to himself in one of the * marginal' oddities. 
It was clearly in good taste, however, to erase the allusion in the 
Sonnet, referring as it did to a cruelty unjustly endured, under a tyran- 
nical Government, by a brave, though thick-headed, man" — Masson. 

Newton notes that Milton has the same allusion in his treatise on 
The Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings out of the Church, where he 
speaks of Prynne as that " hot querist for tithes, whom ye may know, 
by his wits lying ever beside him in the margin, to be ever beside his 
wits in the text, a fierce reformer once, now rankled with a contrary 
heat" (P. W. III. 17). Similarly in The Reason of Church Government 
Milton ridicules the practice of loading the margins of controversial 
pamphlets with references, though he is there alluding not to Prynne 
but to the supporters of episcopacy, " men whose learning and belief 
lies in marginal stuffings" (P. W. II. 481). 

19. in your charge, in the indictment which will be brought against 
you. 

20. Priest is a contraction of presbyter from Gk. irpea^repos 
'elder,' and Milton says that they would be found to be identical not 
in etymology alone ; i.e. that the change from 'priest' to 'presbyter* 
would prove no gain at all, the one being as intolerant and grasping as 
the other had been (according, that is, to Milton, the bitter enemy of 
the Church). 

writ large, i.e. in full [presbyter), not in the abbreviated form 
(priest). 

"In railing at Establishments, Milton condemned not episcopacy 
alone : he thought even the simple institutions of the new Reformation 
too rigid and arbitrary for the natural freedom of conscience : he con- 
tended for that sort of individual or personal religion, by which every 
man is to be his own priest. When these verses were written, Presby- 
terianism was triumphant ; and the Independents and the Churchmen 
joined in one common complaint against a want of toleration" — Warton. 
See Appendix, IV., v., pp. 72 — 74; and cf. the bitter attack on "the 
insatiate Wolf" ( = the Presbyterians) in The Hind and the Panther , 1. 



GLOSSARY. 

asp, XI. 13. Gk. da-irh, Lat. aspis. "A very venomous serpent 
of Egypt, celebrated in connection with the story of Cleopatra's suicide. 
...This serpent is of frequent occurrence along the Nile, and is the 
sacred serpent of ancient Egypt" — Century Did. There is a variant 
form aspick, used in North's Plutarch in the account of Cleopatra's 
death, whence it passed into Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, 
v. 2. 296, 354, and so into Tennyson's Dream of Fair Women, 160 
("Showing the aspick's bite"). 

Attic, xx. 10; lit. "of or pertaining to Attica, or to its capital, 
Athens; Athenian" : hence "having characteristics peculiarly Athenian," 
i.e. of literary style, taste* etc. = "marked by simple, refined elegance." 

baulk; originally (1) 'to miss, omit,' especially a place, i.e. to pass 
by without visiting it; hence (2) the general sense 'to pass over, ignore, 
refrain from touching'; and so (3) 'to neglect, not trouble about.' Cf. 
Shakespeare, Lucrece, 696, 697 : 

" Make slow pursuit, or altogether balk 
The prey"; 
where the reference > to lazy, over- fed hounds which do not trouble to 
hunt their game. 

charm, viu. 5. , In Elizabethan writers charm from Lat. carmen 
usually had the strong sense 'spell, incantation'; cf. ejichant from Lat. 
incantare. See Samson Agonistes, 934, " Thy fair enchanted cup, and 
warbling charms.'''' Both words weakened into the notion ' pleasant, 
delightful,' as the belief in magic declined. In Othello, ill. 4. 57 
charmer = ' sorceress.' 

clime, viu. 8, 'region, land'; cf. I. 242, "Is this the region, this... 
the clime?" So in 2 Henry VI. III. 2. 84, " back again unto my native 
clime"; and in The Merchant of Venice, II. 1. 10. Gk. kXi/ulcl, 'slope,' 
from Kklveiv, 'to slope.' Clitne and climate are 'doublets,' and 'region' 
was the original sense of each; then, because the temperature of a 
region is its most important quality, both words came to mean 'tempera- 
ture.' 

conscience, xxn. 10, 'consciousness'; cf. P. L. viu. 502, "Her 
virtue and the conscience of her worth." So in Hebrews x. 2, "because 
that the worshippers once purged should have had no more conscience 
of sins"; and 1 Corinthians viii. 7. 

fee, xil. 7; much used as a legal term in connection with the 
possession or tenure of land. Thus fee-simple = hereditary land, held 
without any conditions and 'for ever.' See Shakespeare, who is fond 
of legal terms — Hamlet, II. 2. 73, IV. 4. 22; Troilus and Cressida, 



GLOSSARY. 65 

II. 2. 53, V. 1. 26. A. S. feoh (cf. Germ, vieh) meant (1) 'cattle,' 
2) 'property' — cattle being the chief kind of property in a primitive 
tate of society. Cf. Lat. pecunia from pecus. 

fondly, xix. 8, 'foolishly'; cf. Lycidas, 56, "Ay me! I fondly 
Iream." Originally fo?id was the past participle of a Middle English 
ei'b/onuen, 'to act like a fool,' from fan, 'a fool.' This sense 'foolish* 
5 common in Elizabethan writers; cf. Lear, iv. 7. 60, "I am a very 
oolish fond old man." So in the Prayer-Book, "a fond thing vainly 
i ivented" ('Articles of Religion,' XXII.). The root is Scandinavian. 

imp, xv. 8; a falconer's term for " inserting a feather into the wing 
f a hawk, or other bird, in place of one that is broken." Cf. Richard 
I. II. 1. 292, ''''Imp out our drooping country's broken zuing" ; and 
tassinger's Renegado (1624), v. 8: 

" strive to imp 
New feathers to the broken wings of time. " 
[ilton, unlike Shakespeare, seldom uses sporting-terrns. Middle 
nglish i??ipen = l to graft'; an imp is literally ' a grrft, offspring.' 

jolly, I. 4, 'pleasant, genial'; here it suggests 1 the joyousnes's of 
>ring-tido. In Elizabethan English jolly (F. jolt) often meant 'gay, 
stive' in a good sense; its present (vulgar) use illustrates the general 
' ndency of words to deteriorate in sense. F. joli is really of Scandi- 
ivian origin, from the root 'to revel ' which we have in Yule= Christmas, 
e time of rejoicing. 

phylacveries ; from Gk. <pv\aKT-f)piov, ' a safeguard — amulet.' They 
sre pieces of parchment inscribed with passages from the Law of 
oses which the Jews were bidden to wear as "frontlets" on the 
rehead and left arm [Exodus xiii. 1 — 16, Deuteronojny vi. 4 — 8, 
13 — 18). From Mattheiv xxiii. 5 we associate them more particularly 
th "the scribes and Pharisees"; and "to wear broad phylacteries" 
s become a proverbial synonym of hypocrisy. 

purple, xiv. 10 ; much used by poets to denote any rich colour, 
. not limited to what is strictly called ' purple ' ; cf. the similar wide 
2 of Gk. iropcpijpeos and Lat. purpureus. Here perhaps purple means 
more than 'lustrous, radiant'; or, if any particular colour be 
ended, 'rosy' — cf. P. L. VII. 29, 30 where the dawn is said to 
purple the east " = tinge with rosy hues. 

quire, xiii. 10; the older form of choir ; each from Lat. chorus. 
. the Prayer-Book, " In quires and places where they sing." Quire 
s one of the Latin words introduced through Christianity into A. S. 
e sometimes find quirister=- chorister. 

M. S. cr 



66 GLOSSARY. 

ruth, IX. 8, 'pity'; once elsewhere in Milton — cf. Lycidas, 163, 
"Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth." Shakespeare, 
Troilus and Cressida, v. 3. 48, has, "Spur them to ruthful work, rein 
them from ruth," where ruthful= ' piteous'; contrast ruthless. Akin to 
A. S. hreSwan, 'to ?-ue,' > Germ, reue, 'repentance.' 

saints, xviii. r ; a favourite word with Milton and with the Puritans, 
in the general sense 'righteous men,' 'true Christians': many members 
of the party of Republican Independents called themselves ' saints.' 
Cf. P. L. III. 330, iv. 762. The use is Scriptural ; cf. the Epistles of 
St Paul often, e.g. Romans xvi. 2,15. 

sonnet ; F. sonnet, from Ital. sonctto, a diminutive of sono, ' sound, 
tune ' (cf. Lat. sonus). The Sonnet was introduced into English 
literature a little before the middle of the 16th century. At first the 
word was not limited to the particular kind of poem now called a 
'sonnet.' Thus "the very true sonnet" mentioned in Twelfth Night, 
ill. 4. 25 was a ballad. 

spray, I. 1 ; now = ' sprig, ' especially one plucked from a tree or 
flower; but in Elizabethan writers it seems to have had the wider sense 
'branch'; cf. Richard II. ill. 4. 34, "Cut off the heads of too fast 
growing sprays." See also 2 Henry VI. II. 3. 45; and P. R. IV. 437. 

virtue, X. 5, 'courage, valour' — the predominant sense of Lat. 
virtus, from vir, ' a man.' Cf. the Life of Coriolanus in North's Plutarch 
(the source of Shakespeare's Roman plays) : "In those days, valiantness 
was honoured in Rome above all other virtues : which they call virtus, 
by the name of virtue itself, as including in that general name all other 
special virtues besides. So that virtus in the Latin was as much as 
valiantness" (Skeat's ed., p. 2). So in Coriolanus, II. 2. 87, 88. 

waste, XX. 4, ' spend ' ; a Shakespearian use. Cf. Midsummer- Night s 
Dream, 11. 1. 57, "A merrier hour was never wasted there"; and The 
Tempest, v. 301 — 303: 

" My poor cell, where you shall take your rest 
For this one night; which, part of it, I'll waste 
With such discourse" etc. 

wrench, xxi. 4. Used similarly, with a legal colouring, in 2 Henry IV. 
II. 1. 120, where the Chief Justice says to Falstaff: "I am well ac- 
quainted with your manner of wrenching the true cause the false way." 
The literal idea is ' to twist, sprain ' ; hence the figurative notion of 
'crookedness, perversion,' which the noun wrenche always has in Middle 
English. 



APPENDIX. 



This Appendix is meant to supplement the Notes by quoting some of 
the illustrative passages which they merely refer to. Most of the passages 
are from Milton's prose works ; which to many students are not, I suppose, 
easily accessible, 

I. 

MILTON'S GREAT PURPOSE. 

Sonnets II., XIX. 

These Sonnets illustrate the signal feature of Milton's life, viz. his 
purpose of writing a great poem. Sonnet II. was inserted in a letter to 
one of his friends. The letter 1 is a valuable comment on both Sonnets, 
but especially the earlier (1631). He says : 

" Sir, Besides that in sundry other respects I must acknowledge 
me to profit by you whenever we meet, you are often to me, and were 
yesterday especially, as a good watchman to admonish that the hours of 
the night pass on (for so I call my life as yet obscure and unserviceable 
to mankind) and that the day with me is at hand, wherein Christ 
commands all to labor while there is light 2 : which because I am 
persuaded you do to no other purpose, than out of a true desire that 
God should be honor'd in everyone, I therefore think myself bound, 
though unask'd, to give you account, as oft as occasion is, of this my 
tardy moving, according to the precept of my conscience, which I 
firmly trust is not without God." His "tardy moving," he proceeds, 

1 Transcribed in Newton's edition, whence it is here copied, from the Cambridge 
MSS. 

* John ix. 4. See Sonnet xix. 7. 

5—2 



68 SONNETS. 

is not due to any taste for " affected solitariness" or that pedantic love 
of learning whereby the recluse "cuts himselfe off from all action." 
Rather, his present inaction springs from a deep sense of responsibility, 
from the feeling that he must prepare .himself to the very best of his 
ability for his great work, and thus be "more fit," though "late," when 
he does set about it. 

"The love of learning, as it is the pursuit of something good, 
it would sooner follow the more excellent and supreme good known 
and presented, and so be quickly diverted from the empty and fantastic 
chase of shadows and notions to the solid good flowing from due and 
timely obedience to that command 1 in the Gospel set out by the 
terrible seizing 2 of him that hid the talent. It is more probable 
therefore that not the endless delight of speculation, but this very 
consideration of that great commandment, does not press forward, as 
soon as many do, to undergo, but keeps off with a sacred reverence and 
religious advisement how best to undergo ; not taking thought of being 
late, so it give advantage to be more fit ; for those that were latest lost 
nothing, when the master of the vineyard came to give each one his 
hire 3 ." 

The period of self- preparation indicated by this letter accompanying 
the second Sonnet (163 1) extends unbroken up to his Italian journey 
(1638). On Sept. 7, 1637, he writes to a friend to make excuse for his 
remissness as a correspondent : " It is my way to suffer no impediment, 
no love of ease, no avocation whatever, to chill the ardour, to break the 
continuity, or divert the completion of my literary pursuits. From this 
and no other reasons it often happens that I do not readily employ my 
pen in any gratuitous exertions 4 ." 

In the same month, on the 23rd, he tells the same friend, who had 
made enquiry as to his occupations and plans : "I am sure that you 
wish me to gratify your curiosity, and to let you know what I have 
been doing, or am meditating to do. Hear me, my Diodati, and 
suffer me for a moment to speak, without blushing, in a more lofty 
strain. Do you ask what I am meditating? By the help of Heaven, 
an immortality of fame. But what am I doing ? irrepocpvu, I am letting 
my wings grow and preparing to fly; but my Pegasus has not yet 



1 i.e. the command implied in the Parable of the Talents, viz. that man should 
make a full use of his talents and of all that is committed to him. 
- Matthew xxv. 30. 
3 Matthew xx. 
* P. IV. ill. 492. 



APPENDIX. 69 

feathers enough to soar aloft in the fields of air" 1 ." Four years later 
we find a similar admission — " I have not yet completed to my mind 
the full circle of my private studies 2 ." 

This last sentence was written in 1640 (or 1641). Meanwhile his 
resolution had been confirmed by the friendly and flattering encourage- 
ment of Italian men of letters. 

" In 3 the private academies 4 of Italy, whither I was favoured to 
resort, perceiving that some trifles 5 which I had in memory, composed 
at under twenty or thereabout, (for the manner is, that every one must 
give some proof of his wit and reading there,) met with acceptance 
above what was looked for ; and other things 6 , which I had shifted in 
scarcity of books and conveniences to patch up amongst them, were 
received with written encomiums, which the Italian is not forward to 
bestow on men of this side of the Alps ; I began thus far to assent both 
to them and divers of my friends here at home, and not less to an 
inward prompting which now grew daily upon me, that by labour and 
intense study (which I take to be my portion in this life), joined with 
the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave something so 
written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let it die." 

This "inward prompting," thus openly announced in the Reason of 
Church Government (1641), but privately indicated, as we have seen, 
ten years earlier, was still unsatisfied when he wrote Sonnet xix., 
which should be read side by side with Sonnet 11. 



II. 

REFERENCES TO EURIPIDES AND PINDAR. 

Sonnets VIII., XXIII. 

Euripides is said to have been one of Milton's favourite authors. 
In The Reason of Church Government (1641) he speaks of "those 
dramatic constitutions wherein Sophocles and Euripides reign" (i.e. 
are supreme). In the tract On Education (1644) he mentions the 

; p. iv. in. 495. 

1 Church Government, P. W. II. 476. 

3 Church Government, P. W. 11. 477, 478. 

4 He refers to literary societies or clubs, of which there were several at Florence, 
e.g. the Delia Crusca, the Svogliati, etc. 

5 i.e. Latin pieces; the Elegies, as well as some of the poems included in his 
Sylvce, were written before he was twenty-one. 

6 Among the Latin poems which date from his Italian journey are the lines Ad 
Salsillum, a few of the Epigrams, and Mansus. 









yo SONNETS. 

Alcestis (cf. Sonnet xxiii.) as one of the classical plays particularly 
suitable to be read by young students. In the Preface to Samson 
Agonistes (1671) he says that the style of a tragedy and development 
of plot can be properly understood only by those " who are not un- 
acquainted with ^Eschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the three tragic 
poets unequalled yet by any, and the best rule to all who endeavour to 
write Tragedy." Compare too the reference to the classical dramatists 
in the famous passage on Athens in Paradise Regained (iv. 261 — 266) : 

"Thence what the lofty grave tragedians taught 
In chorus or iambic, teachers best 
Of moral prudence, with delight received 
In brief sententious precepts, while they treat 
Of fate and chance and change in human life, 
High actions and high passions best describing"; 

where editors note that the allusion to "brief sententious precepts" 
(yvu/xai) specially fits Euripides. See also 77 Penseroso, gj — 102. 

Milton has several interesting references to Pindar besides that in 
Sonnet viil. — e.g. "those magnific odes and hymns, wherein Pindarus 
and Callimachus are in most things worthy" (Church Government); 
"Dorian lyric odes" (P. P. IV. 257). Compare also his sixth Elegy, 
21 — 26: 

" Quid nisi vina, rosasque, racemiferumque Lyaeum, 
Cantavit brevibus Teia Musa modis? 
Pindaricosque inflat numeros Teumesius Euan, 
Et redolet sumptum pagina quseque merum ; 
Dum gravis everso currus crepat axe supinus, 
Et volat Eleo pulvere fuscus eques : " 

lines which Cowper renders : 

41 What in brief numbers sang Anacreon's Muse? 
Wine, and the rose that sparkling wine bedews. 
Pindar with Bacchus glows — his every line 
Breathes the rich fragrance of inspiring wine, 
While, with loud crash o'erturned, the chariot lies, 
And brown with dust the fiery courser flies." 



APPENDIX. . 71 

III. 

MILTON AND MUSIC. 

Sonnets XIII. , XX. 

The love of music which brought Milton into contact with Henry 
Lawes and which we see in Sonnets XIII. and XX. is illustrated by a 
passage in his treatise On Education. Exercise, he says, in certain 
athletic sports should form part of the daily training of students and be 
followed by an interval of rest. This interval "may, both with profit 
and delight, be taken up in recreating and composing their travailed 
spirits with the solemn and divine harmonies of music, heard or 
learned ; either whilst the skilful organist plies his grave and fancied 
descant in lofty fugues, or the whole symphony with artful and 
unimaginable touches adorn and grace the well-studied chords of 
some choice composer ; sometimes the lute or soft organ-stop waiting 
on elegant voices, either to religious, martial, or civil ditties; which, 
if wise men 1 and prophets be not extremely out 2 , have a great power 
over dispositions and manners, to smooth and make them gentle from 
rustic harshness and distempered passions {P. W. III. 475, 476). " 

It is scarcely necessary to say that he uses musical terms, to which 
he is very partial, with perfect correctness : witness the instances in the 
above passage. For "fugue" see P. L. XI. 563, and for "descant" 
( = the variations added to a plain song or melody in its simplest form) 
compare P. L. IV. 603, where it is applied to the varied notes of the 
nightingale, and S. A. 1228. His use of "symphony" to mean 'a 
company of musicians playing in harmony ' may seem curious, the word 
being now limited, as a musical term, to a particular kind of composi- 
tion ; but it then had the general sense ' harmony ' in accordance with its 
derivation (Gk av pep wv ta). Thus in P, Z-. I. 712 ("dulcet symphonies 
and voices sweet ") it refers to the strains of instruments accompanying 
voices. " Touch" — see Sonnet xx. 11 — was a favourite poetic word to 
indicate the action of the hand on a musical instrument. Cf. P. L. 
IV. 686, "With heavenly touch of instrumental sounds." So in The 
Merchant of Venice ', V. 56, 57 : 

" soft stillness and the night 
Become the touches of sweet harmony " ; 

1 Editors note that the allusion is prims *ily to Plato, more especially to the third 
book of the Republic. 

2 i.e. are not entirely mistaken. 



72 SONNETS. 

and The Passionate Pilgrim, 107, 108: 

" whose heavenly touch 
Upoii the lute doth ravish human sense." 

"Ditty" was applicable to any kind of song, i.e. not depreciatory 
then as now. Milton evidently liked the lute much (Sonnet xx. 11, 
P. Z. V. 151, Ode on the Passion, 28), and the frequent allusions to it 
in Shakespeare prove its popularity in Elizabethan times. But his 
favourite instrument was the organ ; see the oft-cited description of 
organ-playing in P. Z. XI. 560 — 563, and the account of the mechanism 
of the organ in P. Z. I. 708, 709. Other notable passages on music in 
his works are V Allegro, 135 — 150, // Penseroso, 161 — 166, Comus, 
244—264, P. Z. vii. 594—599- 

IV. 

MILTON AND THE PRESBYTERIANS. 

Sonnet XVI.: " On the New Forcers of Conscience." 

Milton had once been in sympathy with the Presbyterian party, but 
much in their action offended him no less than his views on divorce 
(see Sonnets XI., xil.) offended them. The bitterness against the 
Presbyterian ministry which animates his lines ' ' On the New Forcers 
of Conscience" (1646 — 47) and prompted the appeal (1652) to Cromwell 
(Sonnet xvi.) might be illustrated by numerous passages of his prose 
works. The following from The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates 
(1649) * s an example. After admonishing their political leaders " not 
to compel unforcible things, in religion especially," he continues : 

"I have something also to the divines, though brief to [i.e. 
compared to] what were needful ; not to be disturbers of the civil 
affairs, being in hands better able and more belonging to manage 
them; but to study harder, and to attend the office of good pastors... 
which if they ever well considered, how little leisure would they find, 
to be the most pragmatical sidesmen of every popular tumult and 
sedition ! and all this while are to learn what the true end and reason 
is of the gospel which they teach ; and what a world it differs from the 
censorious and supercilious lording over conscience 1 . It would be good 

1 The italics throughout are mine, and draw attention to resemblances, often of 
phrase as well as of substance, to "The New Forcers" and Sonnet xvi. 



APPENDIX. 73 

also they lived so as might persuade the people they hated covetousness, 
which, worse than heresy, is idolatry ; hated pluralities, and all kind of 
simony; left rambling from benefice to benefice, like ravenous wolves 
seeking where they may devour the biggest. Of which if some, well 
and warmly seated from the beginning, be not guilty, it were good 
they held not conversation with such as are. Let them be sorry, that, 
being called to assemble about reforming the church, they fell to 
progging and soliciting the parliament, though they had renounced the 
name of priests, for a new settling of their tithes and oblations. Let 
them assemble in consistory with their elders and deacons, according to 
ancient ecclesiastical rule, to the preserving of church discipline, each 
in his several charge, and not a pack of clergymen by themselves to 
bellycheer in their presumptuous Sion, or to promote designs, abuse 
[deceive] and gull the simple laity, and stir up tumult, as the prelates 
did, for the maintenance of their pride and avarice... [For] if they be 
the ministers of mammon instead of Christ, and scandalize his church 
with the filthy love of gain, aspiring also to sit the closest and the 
heaviest of all tyrants upon the conscience, and fall notoriously into 
the same sins, whereof so lately and loud they accused- the prelates ; 
as God rooted out those, so will he root out them, their imitators 
(P. W. ii. 36, 37)." 



"FREE CONSCIENCE." 
Sonnets XVI. , XVII. : "On the New Forcers of Conscience." 

There was no subject on which Milton felt more strongly than 
religious liberty. Almost the last of his pamphlets on the Church was 
A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes (1659), "shewing 
that it is not lawful for any power on earth to compel in matters of 
religion." The first paragraph begins: 

"Two things there be, which have ever been found working much 
mischief to the church of God and the advancement of truth : force on 
one side restraining, and hire on the other side corrupting, the teachers 
thereof... The former shall be at this time my argument; the latter 1 as 

1 The payment ("hire") of ministers is discussed in the tract that followed a few 
months later, viz. The Likeliest Means to Remove Hireli?igs out 0/ the C hutch. 



74 SONNETS. 

I shall find God disposing me, and opportunity inviting." These are 
some sentences that illustrate his " argument." 

" It is the general consent of all sound protestant writers, that the 
scripture only can be the final judge or rule in matters of religion, and 
that only in the conscience of every Christian to himself."..." Seeing 
then that in matters of religion none can judge or determine here on 
earth, no, not church governors themselves, against the consciences of 
other believers, my inference is that in those matters they 1 neither can 
command nor use constraint."..." Thus then, if church governors can- 
not use force in religion, though but for this reason, because they 
cannot infallibly determine to the conscience without convincement, 
much less have civil magistrates authority to use force where they can 
much 2 less judge ; unless they mean only to be the civil executioners of 
them 3 who have no civil power to give them such commission, no, nor 
yet ecclesiastical, to any force or violence in religion."...*' The apostle 
speaks [2 Cor. x.] of that spiritual power by which Christ governs his 
church, how all-sufficient it is, how powerful to reach the conscience, 
and the inward man with whom it chiefly deals, and whom no power 
else can deal with. In comparison of which, how ineffectual and weak 
is outward force with all her boisterous tools, to the shame of those 
Christians, and especially those churchmen 4 , who to the exercising of 
church-discipline, never cease calling on the civil magistrate to interpose 
his fleshly force."..." Let them cease then to importune and interrupt 
the magistrate from attending to his own charge in civil and moral 
things., let him also forbear force where he hath no right to judge, for 
the conscience is not his province." And he sums up thus : 

"As to those magistrates who think it their work to settle religion, 
and those ministers or others who so oft call upon them to do so, I 
trust, that having well considered what hath been here argued, neither 
they will continue in that intention, nor these in that expectation from 
them ; when they shall find that the settlement of religion belongs only 
to each particular church by persuasive and spiritual means within itself, 
and that the defence only of the church belongs to the magistrate." 

1 The magistrates, civil authorities. 

2 i.e. much less than the church governors. 

3 i.e. ministers of religion. 

4 Presbyterians. 



APPENDIX. 75 

VI. 

MILTON'S BLINDNESS. 

Sonnets XIX., XXII. 

What is said as to Milton's blindness in the brief sketch of his Life 
(p. xviii.) and in the notes on Sonnets XIX., XXII. maybe supplemented 
by mention of an interesting fact, viz. that he believed that his loss of 
physical eyesight was compensated by increased spiritual illumination. 
Thus he asks in a letter " Why should I not submit with complacency 
to this loss of sight, which seems only withdrawn from the body 
without, to increase the sight of the mind within?" (P. W. III. 513). 
The belief is put very vividly in the Second Defence, which was written 
(1654) two years after his blindness was complete. 

" There 1 is, as the apostle has remarked, a way to strength through 
weakness. Let me then be the most feeble creature alive, as long as 
that feebleness serves to invigorate the energies of my rational and 
immortal spirit ; as long as in that obscurity, in which I am enveloped, 
the light of the divine presence more clearly shines, then, in proportion 
as I am weak, I shall be invincibly strong ; and in proportion as I am 
blind, I shall see more clearly. O that I may thus be perfected by 
feebleness, and irradiated by obscurity ! And, indeed, in my blindness, 
I enjoy in no inconsiderable degree the favour of the Deity, who regards 
me with more tenderness and compassion in proportion as I am able to 
behold nothing but himself ;... and is wont to illuminate [my obscurity] 
with an interior light, more precious and more pure " (P. W. 1. 239). 
Compare P. L. ill. 51 — 55, where, after speaking of the outer darkness 
that surrounds him, he ends : 

" So much the rather thou, celestial Light, 
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers 
Irradiate: there plant eyes, all mist from thence 
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell 
Of things invisible to mortal sight." 
See also Samson Agonistes^ 1687 — 1689. 

1 The passage is a translation (Fellowes's), the Second Defence being written in 
Latin so that his vindication of the English people might appeal to all Europe. To 
the same translator we owe the version of Milton's Letters {Epistolce Familiares) in 
Mr St John's edition of the prose works (Bohn's " Standard Library," ill. 487 — 522), 
from which our extracts are made. 



j6 SONNETS. 

One of the finest allusions in literature to Milton's blindness is in 
Gray's lines on him in the Progress of Poesy: 

"Nor second He, that rode sublime 
Upon the seraph-wings of Extasy, 
The secrets of th' Abyss to spy. 

He pass'd the flaming bounds of Place and Time: 
The living Throne, the sapphire blaze, 
Where Angels tremble, while they gaze 1 , 
He saw; but, blasted with excess of light, 
Clos'd his eyes in endless night." 

1 A reference to Paradise Lost, in. 380 — 382 : 

Thee, Father, first they sung, Omnipotent, 
Immutable, Immortal, Infinite, 
Eternal King ; thee, Author of all being, 
Fountain of light, thyself invisible 
Amidst the glorious brightness where thou sitt'st 
Throned inaccessible, but when thou shadest 
The full blaze of thy beams, and through a cloud 
Drawn round about thee like a radiant shrine 
Dark with excessive bright thy skirts appear, 
Yet dazzle Heaven, that brightest Seraphim 
Approach not, but with both wings veil their eyes. 



I. GENERAL INDEX TO THE NOTES. 



Alcestis, story of in Euripides, 59 

Aldersgate-street, Milton's house 
in, 36 

Babylon, "that great city," 54 

Bucer, Martin, professor at Cam- 
bridge, 43 

Casella, friend of Dante, 46 

Chaeronea, battle of, 40 

Charles X. of Sweden 53, 58 

Cheke, Sir John, 42 ; pupils at 
Cambridge, 43 

Church and State, Milton's opinion 
with regard to, 50, 52 

"classic hierarchy" of the Pres- 
byterians 61 

Colasterion, Milton's treatise, 42 

Coke, Sir Edward, 57 

Colchester, siege of, 47, 48 

Colkitto, "young," 42 

"Committee for the propagation 
of the gospel " 49 

Cromwell 49, 50 

Dante, Milton's love of his poetry, 

46 

Darwen, stream of, 50 

divorce, Milton's pamphlets on, 

41 

Dunbar, battle of, 50 

Edwards, Thomas, author of Gan- 

grcena, 61, 62 
Eleclra of Euripides, story about, 

37.38. 

"Emathian conqueror" (Alex- 
ander) 37 
" Epeirot "51 
Episcopacy 60 
Euripides 38, 59 
Fairfax, general, 47, 48 
Favonius 56 



Gillespie, George, Scotch Pres- 
byterian, 62 
Good Shepherd, parable of, 51 
Gordon, Lord George, 42 
Hannibal, " the African bold," 

HOurs, Lat. Hortz, 30 

"Hydra heads" 48 

Isocrates, the "old man eloquent," 
40 

Latona, story of from Ovid, 43 

Lawes, Henry, the composer, 44; 
music of 45 

Lawrence, Henry, friend of 
Milton, 55, 56 

Ley, James, Earl of Marlborough, 
39 ; his daughter Lady Mar- 
garet, a friend of Milton, 39, 40 

liberty 44, 59 

lute, Milton's fondness for, 56 

Midas, King of Phrygia, 45 

Mile-End Green 41 

Milton : his early resolve to write 
a great poem 31, 32; his ap- 
pearance 32 ; blindness of 55, 
58; abstemious habits 56; love 
of music 56; his second wife 

Montrose, campaign of, 42 
Morland, Sir Samuel, his history 

of the Vaudois, 54 
nightingale and cucl 00, legend as 

to, 29, 31 
Pindar 37 

Prayer-Book, use of forbidden, 60 
Presbyterians 60-63 » Milton's 

growing dislike of 41, 50 ; 

their classes 61 
.Preston, battle of, 50 



78. 



/ 



IMDEX. 



Prynne, William, 62, 63 

Pyrrhus, "the fierce Epeirot," 51 

Quintilian 42 

Royal Society, foundation of, 57 

Rutherford, Samuel, 61 

Savoy, Duke of, and the Vaudois, 

53 

11 Scotch What-d'ye-call 62 
singular verb with plural subject, 

45 

Skinner, Cyriac, 57 

Solemn League and Covenant 48 

Sonetto Codato 60 

Steuart, Adam, "mere A. S.," 61 

talents, parable of, $5 



Tertullian, famous saying of, 54 
Telrachordori) Milton's treatise, 

41, 42 
Themis 57 

Trent, Council of, 62 
Tuscan = Italian 56 
Vane, Sir Henry, "the younger," 

Vaudois or Waldenses, their suffer- 
ings, 5 2 > 53 ; their religion 53, 

54 
Westminster Assembly of Divines 

62 

Worcester, battle of, 50 



II. INDEX OF WORDS AND PHRASES 
IN THE NOTES. 



" Attic taste" 56 


nightingale 30 


bar 57 


post (verb) 55 


charms 37 


redouble 54 


clogs 43 


shallow 30 


"cloud of war" 50 


shew'th (rhyming with truth) 32 


commit 45 


"sinews of war " 52 


day-labour 55 


sleek 42 


dishonest 40 


spare to 57 


drench 57 


spell 52 


" eye of day " 30 


spleen 39 


feastful 39 


"sun's bright circle" 37 


" golden rod" 47 


still (adj.) 30 


" gowns, not arms" 51 


"the triple tyrant" 54 


" immortal streams " 47 


"this three years' day" 58 


interpose 57 


"thy fill" 47 


knight-in-arms 36 


timely 30 


maw 51 


timely-happy 32 


nerve 52 


"wreath of victory" 50 



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